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Comment by dave5104 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not that familiar with the Airbnb situation in NY. Why is this a "bad" pattern that NY state has deemed to be a violation of the law?

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There are a number of reasons. Most states have laws regarding how temporary rental properties (otherwise known as hotels) are zoned. You can't suddenly turn a building zoned for residential use into a hotel without getting it re-zoned.

Also, NY specifically worries that it will change the local housing market. If investors buy up enough local properties and turn them into mini hotels, locals may be priced out of these neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods will in turn suffer.

Plus there are the complaints from the locals. Having a neighbour rent out their place to tourists a couple of times a year is not a big deal, but if it happens every single week it gets annoying. You never know who is coming and going and they aren't always all that worried about noise, garbage, etc.

And just to clarify, I think the state is right to be concerned about these issues. But at the same time I would hate to lose the ability for someone to put their primary residence on a site like Airbnb a couple of times a year. This helps visitors and the residents without significantly hurting anything else in the equation. Things only start to turn sour when enough people create dedicated Airbnb properties as investments.

It's a bit sad that you have to explain this to grown up people.

I'm not sure that residential/commercial zoning laws in US states falls under the umbrella of general knowledge.

There's nothing US specific about zoning laws. They most probably preceded the founding of your silly colony.

The first modern zoning was in 1916 in New York for height related reasons. Great Britain didn't start zoning until 1947.

EDIT: I was sort of surprised that was the first zoning, when I just looked it up. I always mentally associated zoning with 1920s progressive social engineering.

HAHA, take that ole Blighty!

But really, the whole idea that AirBNB should be able to ignore established zoning is another example of why I consider the "sharing" economy to be the "taking" economy.

Sharing space peacefully is exactly what zoning is aimed at.

Zoning is still a contested topic, it has been blamed for enabling much of the NIMBYism in America for example. Another one is creating huge traffic and commuting situations that don't need to be there by putting business in one zone, housing in another and forcing people to move between the two every day. It makes such things as shopkeeper residences where the shop is on the first floor and the family who manages it lives on the second or third floors significantly more work.

My bustling city (one of those "top US cities to move to that isn't the Bay Area or NYC") has tons of first-floor commercial, second floor residential developments, including a fair number of "row houses" zoned commercial first floor residential second and third floors where both the commercial space and residential areas are owned by the same owner. There's a huge push to build high density in this city that was formerly pretty much all low-density ten years ago.

These are all new builds in the past 8 years.

Not true. Paris had zoning laws (including building height restrictions and business location restrictions) since before Haussman, in the early 1800s[0].

New York passed the first US laws, as far as I can tell from a quick search (although I do see vague references to San Francisco using zoning laws against the Chinese in the 1880s, and a lot of people, including Wikipedia, quoting a more limited achievement of 'the first comprehensive/city-wide zoning laws' for New York), but Europe definitely predated them. I believe Germany and some other countries also had them, besides France.

[0]: http://books.google.com/books?id=dONVGtJzxrwC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA...

NYC had numerous building codes and restrictions previously, including the 1867 Tenement Law, and the famous 1901 new tenement law.

Buddy just asked a question that solicited an informative answer for all of us to read. Not sad.

The general "sad" for me is that HN has so many strong libertarian types who start from an assumption that government regulation is practically always wrong and done for corrupt purposes. Learning that this is not the case is a lesson one could easily pick up much earlier in life, so it's sad that they made it this far without understanding that.

I put it down to the poor state of our mathematical education. The naive understanding of economic systems libertarians display is actually fairly similar to what you see in introductory dynamical-systems courses. You can, with great care, construct some "well-behaved" systems where you present a set of rules, and the expected thing happens: you push lever X and Y happens. Raise the minimum wage and unemployment rises!

But of course, most systems are not so well-behaved, so that is only a lead-in to the real examples, where you change the setup slightly and suddenly analysis grows more complex. Now what happens when you push lever X depends on what region of the state-space you're in! And sometimes pushing lever X can change the region of the state-space you're in, too! There is feedback and internal dynamics. I see very little libertarian economics that displays even a 101-level understanding of any of that.

If you keep treating your intellectual opponents like this, you're going to get trounced the next time you run into a smart one.

To be very brief, you seem to think that libertarians believe, roughly,

(1) "the world is simple, so we should have simple rules."

Instead, you suggest:

(2) "the world is complicated, so we should have complicated rules."

But this claim is entirely unresponsive to:

(3) "the world is complicated, so we should have simple rules."

which is what most libertarians I know actually think. If you respond to (1) when your opponents are arguing for (3), you will not have productive conversations.

Our attitude towards any law really should be a presumption of doubt, especially laws that interfere with consensual activities. Laws are blunt objects that come with their own enforcement costs and unintended consequences. We should be especially wary about regulations whose benefits are sharply concentrated among a small group (say, hotel owners), and whose drawbacks (say, slightly higher hotel costs for everyone else) are widely dispersed. That's standard public choice theory. That doesn't mean that no regulations are ever justifiable (far from it!), but it does suggest that we not favor regulation for the sake of regulation.

I don't like to psychologize people, but I wonder whether this attitude is a sort of mental heuristic on the left, which often finds itself fighting with folks on the right who seem to believe, roughly, that regulation is intrinsically bad, and should be abolished. This has encouraged the counter-formation of the view that regulation is intrinsically good, and should be preserved. I guess that's a little easier to remember than the subtler view that regulation is intrinsically bad, but should sometimes be preserved when it can still improve outcomes over the status quo.

It's almost as though you have to examine things case by case and decide whether a dangerous tool should be applied, instead of just forming a mental affiliation with it.

These people are investors. Investors usually look solely at the money instead of the effects or consequences.

I think your missing a huge one. Taxes, hotels in major city's often send 10+$ a day to the local government. And before people complain about this that money often pays for things like museums and convention centers which is why many people are going to the city in the first place.

Edit: NY get's 10$ on a one room 140$ hotel room stay as it's $2.00 per day per room* + 5.875% of the rent. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/business/hotel.shtml

So if NYC just made airbnb charge the 5.875% tax, most of their complaints would go away? And by increasing the hotel supply, hotel prices would go down to better match actual long term renting? Then it would create a more liquid housing market enabled by computerized markets? It would still allow casual renting of people's houses that way.

No, their complaints aren't strictly about the missing tax revenue. There are other regulations that would need to be addressed (health, safety, etc...). Hotels are a heavily regulated industry with good reason. Regulations are a protection mechanism to protect the city/neighborhood and the consumer.

I think that there is a clear difference between renting out a room or occasionally renting your entire place, versus keeping a separate apartment strictly for renting out on AirBnB.

What NY is mainly worried about (and has the strongest public support for them worrying about) is AirBnB being used as a way of de facto running unlicensed hotels. People don't like discovering that the room down the hall from where they live has essentially been converted into a hotel room, with customers coming and going regularly, no hotel tax paid, and none of the usual health/safety regulations applied (industrial-strength fabric cleaning, etc.). By comparison, someone renting out a spare room now and then is not as likely to produce social or health problems, and most of the public probably views it as benign, even if also technically a violation of your lease.

I don't like this kind of thing as a customer, either. When I look for a place on AirBnB, I expect it to be someone's actual house/apt, which they treat as their own, because they also live there. If that's not the case, it should be made really clear up front.

Illegal hotels aka slums. There is a reason hotels are fairly highly regulated. My first (and only) stay at an Airbnb rental resulted in me getting bedbugs.

You won't be safe from bedbugs just because you're in a hotel.

I have been for my entire life, but YMMV.

the likelihood of you getting bedbugs in a hotel room is smaller than from a random room in all of NYC. Granted , the rooms up on airbnb for the moment probably don't represent a uniform cut of NYC, but considering the type of people who would start running unlicensed hotels, I'd imagine it being more likely.

It is unrealistic to expect any dwelling, whether it be hotel or hostel, to be free of bed bugs, especially if you're in a region with lots of international travelers. There is no effective insecticide for them, they can be impossible to see, and they don't need to eat for months.

Now, any decent hotel will be doing periodic checks for bedbugs around the box spring and headboard, and any other wooden furniture. But there will always exist a small chance that the last person to be in the room brought a couple and you will get them.

Good news is they don't transmit any disease, and if they bite you, it just itches for a few days and goes away.

In nearly all US jurisdictions, hotels are required to maintain units free of vermin, including bedbugs. Private residences are not. Thus, if a hotel fails to keep the room free of bedbugs, they are generally (1) obligated to refund your room charges and (2) pay to replace any luggage or clothing rendered unusable by the pest infestation.

??? If there's no effective insecticide, how do you think we're killing them? The various -methrin-based compounds are generally pretty effective, though occasionally resistant subpopulations crop up.

A shop vac removes them from a mattress.

If I read your comment correct (why is it bad for NY to be against airbnb scenarios like this) then no, it's not a bad trend. To elaborate, many places (not just the US, and not just New York) has rent-control laws. By and large not everywhere, and not all parts of the cities/counties who has. But for those that do, this is in clear violation of at least that, but also - possibly - sublet laws. That is a far fetched example though.

But the more worrying part is that it drives up prices as more and more do this (not talking 1-2 appartments in a neighbourhood, talking increasing).

Another issue is the housing situation. In many larger cities it's a real issue that there aren't enough places to live as needed.

For hotels it is bad, as it's driving business away.

So, from both sides of the spectrum this is bad. For people looking to get some extra cash (not saying it's bad - as the post also mentions, it's an active investment), and for people looking for a place to rent while on vacation, it is good.

I'm not intimately familiar with the legal landscape, but in short I think its because a) the myriad laws governing personal property are much different than those governing commercial property b) significant part of AirBNB's model ignores consumer protection laws.

In general, tenant / landlord relationships are heavily regulated - legal objections to AirBnB style rentals (pretty reasonably, in my opinion) claim that anyone who has a unit that is primarily a rental for tenants is a landlord, and should be subjected to all the regulations typically defined in that relationship - a different situation than someone who is going to be away for a few weeks renting out their own personal residence during that temporary time.

Because many of those who are renting out apartments in this manner are doing so without a "hotel license", charging the appropriate hotel taxes or otherwise abiding by laws put in place to preserve the rights of neighbors.

You could probably argue that they are most peeved about not getting the hotel taxes.

>> laws put in place to preserve the rights of neighbors. Sure about that?

If you lived in a high-rise condo and paid go money to do so, and the two places on either side of you started being rented out to random people who were there one week and gone the next, how would you feel?

As others have pointed out, residential zoning laws aren't generally the product of corporate malfeasance. Usually they are there to help combat it. That's what NIMBYism is all about.

> If you lived in a high-rise condo and paid go money to do so, and the two places on either side of you started being rented out to random people who were there one week and gone the next, how would you feel?

I probably wouldn't care because there would be no way to detect if it was happening, without me standing outside my door all night like a sentry.

Sure, I'd be annoyed if some of the guests came and went at all hours of the night and that was waking me up regularly, but that could happen just as easily with more permanent neighbors, and I'd be able to do just as little about that.

NY wants to protect the classic hotel business. Hotels and building owners need to take care of all kind of legal and administrative procedures, including security considerations for their users. Airbnb apartment owners are now competing for free with those business.

Not saying i agree, but that's the main motivation behind of Airbnb regulations, in NY and other places.

Not really - it's the rights of the neighbours, who didn't sign up to live in a hotel with people coming and going at all hours, partying, damage/wear and tear, etc.

An interesting bit of evidence that resident concerns are a common motivation: in upscale buildings, which have the funds to pay for it, the crackdown on AirBnB is in even more full swing, through "free-market policing". Some condo associations actually have employees regularly scouring AirBnB ads in their area and looking at the photos to find rentals that look like units in their building (it's often not hard to spot, if you know a building well). Then the owner is identified and sent a "stop doing that" letter, and/or sued for violating their contract.

Probably because it makes it harder for residents to find an apartment.

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