Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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Is there anything preventing the AG from subpoenaing strictly the records of people who actually fit the bill of what they're looking for?

According to the WSJ[1] the investigation is looking strictly at "people who might be trying to skirt New York's laws by renting out multiple units or obtaining their primary residence through Airbnb for extended periods"

It seems like this can be accomplished without a whole-hog dump of every NYC-area landlord. Why not have AirBnb dump this data, with a neutral third party auditing?

One thing that doesn't smell right though:

> "Airbnb has about 15,000 hosts—or people who share their living space—spread out among New York City's five boroughs, with 87% of them renting out the homes that they live in."

I call shenanigans on this. I've done searches throughout NYC as a curiosity exercise last time this topic came up. "Whole apartment" listings vastly outnumber "room in apartment" or "shared room" listings. The notion that the vast majority of Airbnb landlords are present, or renting out parts of their existing homes, does not seem to bear out in reality.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230444140457912...

There is some ambiguous confusion in the reporting:

Are residents splitting space with visitors, or splitting time?

A common practice is that if you get a visitor from AirBnB, the resident goes and crashes at a friend's place for the duration of the stay.

(Heh, imagine if the resident used AirBnB to find a cramped accommodation for the duration! Full liquidity in the housing msrket!)

From the AG's perspective, pretty much everyone in New York renting their place via Airbnb is breaking the law. That their goal is to only go after the flagrant violators doesn't really change the validity of their subpoena.

It says "renting out the homes that they live in". Things it does not say: "renting out part of the homes that they live in" and "are present in the home during the rental period".

If I'm on the other side of the planet for a few weeks, I still live in my home in Washington, although I am not present at that time.

It still doesn't bear out from what I've seen.

Sadly, AirBnb doesn't have an API I can poke at to make it more scientific - but I went through a bunch of listings in NYC a few days ago, and nearly all of the "whole apartment" listings are professional operations that operate year-round, not ad hoc arrangements (i.e., "I'm out of town, take my place").

One easy way to tell is to take a peek at the property's calendar. I'm pretty sure regular bookings for months at a time suggests it's not exactly someone renting out their primary residence.

I don't really get the "obtaining their primary residence through Airbnb for extended periods" line - does this mean living at Airbnbs with no other permanent address is breaking a NY law?

Yes, but AirBnB has a database. All of the violators are just an SQL query away from being discovered.

I wonder if the AG will threaten AirBnB with abetting crime of conspiracy, or some other BS in order to coerce complince....

Why would it be BS? Really, there are laws and far too many startups gloss right over them and then all shocked and such that it applies to them. Then they double down their idiocy by trying to gen up support from people equally ignorant of the law or just anti-government in general.

So, yeah, court order, the charge will be with tax evasion if they really want to get rough.

The laws in this case exist solely to enrich very entrenched interests, specifically hotels that legally bribe (aka lobby) politicians to regulate their little part of the world to keep competition out.

Nothing noble about that.

What an entirely myopic view. The core of hotel regulation stems from decades of hard-learned lessons - NYC's lodging and housing laws are a mile long because they represent the tens of thousands of ways that landlords and hoteliers have discovered over centuries to fuck over their tenants.

Regulations also aren't free. As we've added to housing regulation, compliance costs have risen, and like any other industry high regulatory compliance costs discourage competition from small businesses. Regulations also ensnare unintended targets, especially when they've been iteratively built upon over decades or centuries. Like code, it is difficult to predict the full behavior of a piece of legislation over a vast and complex economy.

This puts us in a tricky balancing act. We need regulation because we've observed the many, many ways an unregulated market tends to fuck over its own customers. We also need to limit regulation in order to preserve competition and avoid people getting screwed by the law even when they aren't the intended targets of said laws.

There are, of course, malicious actors within the system on both sides. Those who seek to add regulations that have little to no public benefit, to further their own interests, and those who seek to remove necessary regulation to further theirs. The incumbent hotel industry tend to represent the former, and AirBnb represents the latter. Neither are working in the interests of the public, though they would both claim to be.

You've bought AirBnb's bullshit propaganda instead of Starwood Hotels' bullshit propaganda. Whoopee.

Both sides, if permitted the full extent of their desired regulations (or lack thereof) would be disastrous for the public and consumers. We, as the public, need to reign them both in, letting either side "win" would be silly and shitty.

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