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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

"To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?"

To solve this, New York City (basically) banned Airbnb's and home ownership is now famously more accessible in the City? I am not even asking for home ownership + rentals to be solved, I am asking whether it got even slightly better because of this ban?

Meanwhile, I can't visit my sister because the regulation cartel..I mean Hotel Lobby has spiked pricing to the high heavens.

Maaaybe we need to revisit some of these easy assumptions on your list?

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>To solve this, New York City (basically) banned Airbnb's and home ownership is now famously more accessible in the City?

I don't know about home ownership - but not having random strangers in the building at random hours of the day/night is a definite improvement.

>the regulation cartel..I mean Hotel Lobby has spiked pricing

Does supply/demand pricing not apply to hotel rooms?

>I don't know about home ownership - but not having random strangers I

I mean, this is just garden variety NIMBY-ism. Having a quiet farmhouse in the middle of midtown would also be a definite improvement just for you, but you're choosing to live in the most economically productive center in the world, and there are practical tradeoffs for that.

No, we just want to get to know our neighbors. Not live next door to a rotating party house

Or you can get to know me! Visiting from another city. New friends are good! <2% of most cities are Airbnb's, they by no means preclude having permanent neighbors.

And parties are banned on the platform, I know because I had enforcement against me for even having my sister's family over when Airbnb's were legal in New York City.

Air BNB guests are a net drain on my neighborhood. You do not add anything to the community. I can't ask you for a cup of sugar. You're a party of strangers who I'll never see again. I'm not on vacation trying to introduce myself to the locals, I'm catching up with my neighbors. Your tourist dollars would flow to my city just fine if you stayed in a hotel.

Hey man no offense but I would much prefer to know someone for 365 days than for 2. That’s awesome you want to visit, stay in a hotel and maybe I’ll run into you at some event in my city but I don’t need you staying in what should be permanent housing.

The Airbnb isn't just about the cost of homes but also the comfort of people living in them. Would you want to live under an Airbnb? With the constant rotation of people, parties, etc?

I know it might shock many but a lot of people (I would say most) buy a flat to live in it and making it into a pseudo-hotel lower the quality of life at the benefit of the airbnb owner.

This is what HOAs are for. To ban the model of home sharing city wide is heavy handed if you're simple goal is to make existing tenants more comfortable. In a free market, people should be able to shop for what they want and make tradeoffs on the basis of price.

Fuck Airbnb. Half my old neighborhood is short term rentals, lame af.

It is well studied that many startups succeed by intentionally operating in gray areas or otherwise flouting rules/norms.

Sure, it is logical that opening a previously restricted or infeasible product space is an easy way to produce business opportunities. Like the legalization of gambling in Nevada.

> Maaaybe we need to revisit some of these easy assumptions on your list?

Nobody said that banning Airbnb would by itself make buying housing in New York more accessible. It’s not an assumption that anybody in good faith ever made.

Can't you crash on your sister's couch?

When you put oil on fire, it will suddenly stop burning as soon as you stop putting new oil on it.

The housing crisis has multiple causes, regulatory framework which benefits existing homeowners is one of them, capitalists treating houses like the stock market is another, and Laissez Faire hotel market did only make it worse (like a gasoline on a burning fire). Now that the thing that made a bad thing worse has been banned, that does not mean the damage it caused has been fixed, nor does it mean that the other causes have been resolved either.

The housing crisis has one problem and it is identical to this one:

Taylor Swift is coming to the local stadium to play a concert. There are 1,000,000 fans in the area that would like to see her live. The stadium seats 100,000. How do we reconcile the imbalance between demand and supply of tickets?

Solve this problem, and the housing crisis is also solved.

It is not identical to this one. There exists enough land and construction material to build housing for everyone. Many cities have enough money to buy or construct social housing for anyone who wants, but they don‘t for multiple reasons (including ideological dogma in favor of capitalism; but also conflicting interests; outsized political influence of existing homeowners; etc.).

In this analogy we could use our shared funds to hire Taylor Swift for 10 subsequent concerts, and the only issue would be who gets to see her first.

Sure, she can cancel on 9 other cities so everyone here can get a chance. A fix for us, but really just taking from someone else.

But that's fine, lets ditch the stadium, and move to a park. The park measures greater than 1,000,000 sq. ft., so we should be good. But now we severely downgraded the quality of everything so we could accommodate everyone. The stadium, although limited capacity, is purpose build to accommodate that capacity. The park, is just Earth, and in no way was designed for a concert, much less 1,000,000 people. This has happened before (not sure if with 1,000,000 but maybe) and I don't think I need to spell out the negatives. Taylor gets icey on the show because of the non-low chance it goes in the record books as an absolute disaster.

"Many cities have enough money to buy or construct social housing for anyone who wants"

This is patently untrue. Especially for superstar cities that people actually want to live in precisely because the cost of housing is too large.

"outsized political influence of existing homeowners; "

Otherwise known as NIMBY's not Airbnb's.

No because Airbnb bans are basically political bike shedding. Yell at the guys sprinkling oil on the fire because taking on the NIMBY's flooding the region with oil is too difficult.

"Multiple causes" is just mealy-mouthed pussy-footing, there is one big cause and then a bunch of other distractions as the numbers now prove.

You're theory about some NIMBY conspiracy is significantly worse on every metric then your strawman's theory about Airbnb causing the housing crisis. Both are bad, but yours is worse.

Complex problems seldomly have a single cause not a simple solution.

It's not a conspiracy, they aren't meeting in smoke-filled rooms. It's just a systemic problem, a classic tragedy of the commons. An individual neighborhood move to protect an old church is noble and courageous, but do that all across society and you basically have a construction standstill that is difficult to visualize and effectively regulate against. So yes, it is a complex problem, but the cause is singular, and because of its multi-dimensionality, I find these causes to be far more insidious than "profit-bad" problems.

I think the second more prominent cause maybe costs, labor, material, interest rates etc. But Airbnb's are far..farrr down the list so as to be completely irrelevant, as the natural experiment in New York has proven out.

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