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Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

As an SF resident, I'd support something that allowed short-term rentals only if the host is present and the host is the owner. Permanent AirBnB units don't help the housing market in the city.

I find it funny that AirBnB's justification is that their users rely on the money to make ends meet. But at the same time, if you're taking a unit off the legit long-term rental market to put it on the permanent short-term AirBnB market you are by definition driving up rents for everyone in the city by reducing the supply of rentals. So the justification is: "San Francisco is so expensive, our customers need the ability to drive up rents even more because rents are so high!"

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That's a funny point, but consider this: Land (along with regulation) is what limits the supply of housing in SF. If you transform a house to a hotel, then yes, it's true, the supply of housing has fallen. However, at the same time, the supply of hotels has risen. If the world equilibrates, then perhaps a hotel is torn down elsewhere and its land is freed up for housing. So I don't think it's necessarily the case that short-term rentals drive up the price of long-term rentals (but perhaps it is once you acknowledge that hotel rooms have higher density than AirBnB).

Also, it seems like this logic could apply to anything. Oh, you're building a Chipotle so that poor people can eat cheap food and earn money? Well that Chipotle takes up land, driving up rental prices. High rental prices means that people have less money and less of a budget for food. So the justification is: "San Francisco residents are so poor, they need the ability to become drive up prices and become even poorer!" But that seems a bit silly.

Just an aside but it's almost all regulation that limits the supply of housing in SF. There is essentially no lack of land due to our technical ability to stack things vertically.

Regulation isn't really the limit there. Regulation is the mechanism that implements the limit. The limit comes from the combined views of the citizenry about what sort of place they'd like their city to be.

I live in SF and I feel something different. The regulations are consistent with versions of SF that most of its citizenry would not like (e.g. like Malibu).

Is it really the combined views of the citizenry? Or is it primarily the views of a minority of wealthy landowners who have political influence more proportional to their wealth than their numbers?

It's combined through a complicated weighting function, and we can certainly argue about that function.

But I'll note that just last year there were a pair of ballot propositions where circa 2/3rds of voters rejected raising height limits for a big new project:

http://ballotpedia.org/8_Washington_Street_Development-Initi...

And having lived here quite a while, I'm sure it's not only wealthy landlords who are opposed to unrestricted high-rise development.

I don't buy this argument at all. They were proposing to build 134 condos at $5 million each. That isn't increasing the housing supply (much), it is giving away the one-of-a-kind waterfront for some pied-à-terres for rich out of state buyers.

It's actually the other way around. Major landowners want to build more units because there's plenty of money to be made.

It's existing renters who are stopping new development. Long term renters have fantastic rates because of how rent control laws are written. And they want to keep their rent low (for themselves, new arrivals can get screwed), their streets sunny (instead of being overshadowed by high rises), and their neighborhoods not too crowded.

This may not be important, but just to clarify my thoughts above: if we had unlimited land then things like maximum height regulations would no longer be a problem. In my mind it's the combination of limited land and regulation, not just the regulation, that raises house prices. (Not meaning to disagree with you, just to clarify.)

The major drivers of housing supply / demand in SF are rent control and permitting, not short term rentals.

Exactly, how much of the city do you think AirBNB is renting out?

A random search on AirBnB for a date in December shows me about 900 "Entire Place" rentals available. I'm not saying that all those would definitely be long-term rentals in the city, but I have a hard time believing that there are about a thousand empty apartments/houses that would otherwise just be sitting empty were there not the lucrative AirBnB market.

I don't know about those specific 900 listings on airbnb, but IIRC SF has an ~8% vacancy rate which tens of thousands of housing units.

So if AirBNB didn't exist there would be an extra 1000 units available... (I'd estimate you're realistically looking at 100 units tops)

825,000 people, assume 2.4 people per unit meaning SF will need ~340,000 housing units with a population growth rate of 0.9% each year SF will need an additional 3060 units.

So if we get rid of every AirBNB unit SF could potentially meet 1/3rd of it's additional supply for 1 year. aka. big fucking deal, what are you going to do next year?

I guess the question I have is, should someone be able to do a housing swap? Say, let someone trade use their home in SF for a week in exchange for use of the other party's home in NY? Does that need to be regulated?

I agree that there's a huge grey area in terms of defining what crosses the line. I should be able to let my buddy stay at my place if I'm not here. I also don't have a problem if places that legitimately would have just been empty are rented to tourists (ie I'm traveling for 3 weeks and otherwise would just leave my place empty).

The thing that's not OK is when someone realizes they can rent out their place as a permanent hotel to tourists and get more income than renting it out to residents. So I think a first step is to stop the ability to convert a rental unit serving residents into a hotel for tourists. Then the more nuanced stuff beyond that will take a lot more debate.

Perhaps the solution is that the host must have the property as their primary residence. This implies they spend over half of the year at that property.

That's nice and simple. It also covers my case: after my mom died, I went and spent a summer back home. It was great to be able to rent my place out here to cover the cost of renting a place there.

And I think there's a good incentive there. I was very choosy about who I let stay, because I was letting them into my own home. I didn't want anybody stealing my books or breaking my things. For a unit set up as a virtual hotel room, I expect people would be less careful about guests.

So isn't David Chiu's proposal, which requires the resident to live there at least 75% of the time, enough?

This regulation is meant to stop people from buying cheap apartments and turning them into makeshift hotels.

Why not just let the apartment complex or home owner put rules in the lease that specify what kinds of behavior will result in eviction? I don't even see the need for specific rules against short-term rentals, because those don't inherently cause problems to anyone. If you're concerned about noise, just have a rule about noise.

One reason would be that the housing market is bad enough without converting a bunch of housing stock into virtual hotels.

But more directly answering your question, what you're talking about is coming up with a good set of regulations for virtual hotels. That's hard. We often solve similar problems through zoning. E.g., we don't come up with a zillion little regulations on exactly what should be allowed in an industrial area versus a residential area. We just put compatible sorts of use together, and then mainly trust that people will work it out.

Permanent AirBnB units don't help the housing market in the city.

I could see that it might not help, but does it hurt?

It takes what would otherwise be rental units for SF residents off the market and instead provides them to tourists. So my opinion is that yeah, that hurts the residents of the city.

You could make the argument that increasing tourism, or increasing the available footprint of where tourists stay (ie not just downtown where all the hotels are) is beneficial. I would actually love to see legit bed and breakfasts open in many more parts of the city. As it is your hotel choices are basically limited to downtown and Fisherman's Wharf. But I don't think helping tourism in SF should come at the cost of making the city less affordable for residents.

> It takes what would otherwise be rental units for SF residents off the market and instead provides them to tourists. So my opinion is that yeah, that hurts the residents of the city.

By lowering the supply of long-term rentals, it would drive the cost up, which would incentivize the production of more long-term housing.

Incentive is not the problem with more housing... there is presently a huge demand for housing.

Well, the fact that most useful development is illegal is a massive disincentive.

production of more long-term housing is already hugely incentivized but severely limited due to anti-development regulations and activism

I agree.

Yes. It reduces supply in the long-term housing market by taking a unit that otherwise be permanently occupied and renting it out short-term. I like staying in STR's when I travel, but I think this is a case where some regulation is reasonable. Hotel rates are so much higher than long-term rental rates on a nightly basis that there's a strong market incentive to use your property as an STR rather than LTR.

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