I will never understand the desire to control one's neighbors' property.
I don't care who owns it and it's none of my business how they use it.
I don't care who owns it and it's none of my business how they use it.
This is where elections, the court system, and societal norms come into play. Make your voice heard at the local level. Get involved. Convince your neighbors that AirBnB is a good thing and shouldn't be any of their or your business. Perhaps your view will prevail with regard to AirBnB.
I suggest though that saying that how land is used is none of your business (or mine) is not the right method. It makes you sound extreme. There are far too many people on the planet and far too many people with nefarious intent to let everyone do as they please with their land.
Real estate has gone up 30-50% since I moved to Portland 4 years ago, so of course, so have rents. 10+%/yr is a crazy number. Most people didn't make that much more income in the same time frame. I have friends that live in a house and rent a part of the house on AirBNB, and it helps them, and for that I am happy. But I'm torn about whether it's positive overall for the city to let out-of-state management companies buy out what's left of Portland's (very, very limited) supply of real estate and flip it for guerrilla hotel usage.
I'm not saying AirBNB should be illegal, but Portlanders generally don't want to become California's vacation home, they don't want to copy the dog-eat-dog jungle that is modern San Francisco, they've never been an Ayn Rand libertarian whatever, and their strong tradition of progressive, heavily interventionist government planning (for things like, say, affordable housing) are being put in jeopardy by these disruptions.
It's all quite understandable, again, whether you agree with it or not.
Looking for an apartment two years apart in the exact same neighborhood (fall 2012 and fall 2014) I saw an incredible difference completely unrelated to any other economic change in the area. I'm not sure what else to attribute it to.
1 -http://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/New...
I'm not sure I'd want to live next to an apartment that constantly has new guests, any of which could do who knows what to the building.
People are upset that other people are better off than they are, and using the extra financial leverage to treat an apartment as a temporary vacation home. Jealousy, plain and simple.
Not even slightly. People are upset because homes surrounding theirs are being rented out to short term tenants that do not care about the long or even medium term future of the home and it's surroundings.
If you lived in an apartment building filled with tourists drunkenly stumbling around the stairwells, breaking fixtures and otherwise ruining the shared facilities, you might appreciate the concept.
I am in their position. And I am anything but sympathetic for that very reason.
Of course I'm not ok with people destroying things. But I don't think that having a law making subleasing illegal prevents that. You're acting as if the ability to do what I want with my property makes it a foregone conclusion that evil things will happen.
No, I'm acting as if the ability for an unlimited and unknown number of complete strangers to enter my apartment building makes it a foregone conclusion that evil things will happen, which is pretty much true. Even if the vast majority of AirBnB customers behave, the odds are that there will always be an outlier that will ruin it.
None of this is perfect of course. And rules can get pretty silly especially when you start talking about homeowners associations and historical districts and the like. But in the aggregate, these laws serve a useful purpose.
1. "HOAs exist for a reason." They exist under the pretense that they maintain or increase property values. There is no evidence that this is the case. I have spent well over 100 hours researching this, and was unable to find conclusive data to prove this (and used said data to help communities dissolve their HOAs).
2. Short term rental restrictions fall under city/local (and sometimes state) government ordinances, which are enacted to allow for reasonable housing costs for local citizens.
I'd highly recommend Portland's local government get in touch with the NY Attorney General's office to get their recommendations on how to persuade AirBNB to maintain compliance with their local laws.
And New York has experience in exactly how to do this, hence my recommendation! Don't walk the trail of broken glass someone else already has.
What I do affects my neighbors because many things do not stop at the property border. This can include smells, visual impact, water runoff, sound, chemical waste, and risk of fire.
For example, if I decided to run a dry cleaning business at home then my neighbor might be affected by the additional street traffic (a shared resource), the noise of customers coming in and out, and the smell of chemicals. Plus, I dispose of the waste chemicals by pouring them into the ground, which seeps into my neighbors' well water. They might not like that.
If I decide to start a fertilizer factory (I'll call it 'West Fertilizer Company II'), then my neighbors might be worried about explosions destroying their home. If I decide to raise cattle, and build a waste lagoon on the edge of my property then my neighbors might be concerned about the smell and the possibility of overflow, both as waste and erosion. If I decide to test my air raid siren collection at 3am then I suspect that my neighbors might have a problem.
There are several ways to handle this. One is as an easement system. When you purchase your land, you do not have complete say over what happens on the land. For example, there may be a right-of-way which allows people to cross your land in order to get to the beach. You must also allow people to use the sidewalk, and you are required to keep it clear.
So you can think of your neighbors as having certain easement rights, which you agreed to when you purchased the land. Just like the airport has purchased the air rights above a certain height, in properties near the airport, your neighbors also have acquired certain rights. For an example, from http://www.englandairpark.org/sites/default/files/docs/Broch... :
> The Avigation Easement grants a right-of-way for the free and unobstructed flight and passage of aircraft through the airspace above, over and across the surface of the property, together with the right to cause such noise, vibration, odors, vapors, particulates, smoke, dust, or other effects as may be inherent in the operation of aircraft, and for the use of said airspace by aircraft for approaching, landing upon, taking off from, maneuvering about or operating on the Alexandria International Airport.
As you can see, some of these rights can be on the market, but others are illiquid.
However, there are a lot of things which can transgress the property lines. It's too many to enumerate explicitly. Rather than having billions of bilateral neighbor agreements, with billions of opportunities for loopholes, and the need to upgrade those agreements over time as problems arise, we have a unified code and legal framework which handles most of them.
Most of the problems that arise in our building are from short-term rentals who have no respect for the property or the tenants. They often leave trash, vandalize, and misuse the property to fit their short-term needs. Tenants and owners are subject to rules and consequences which helps moderate behavior.
While I don't have an issue with the principle of the matter, most short term rentals seem to be done illegally and there's little oversight over these guests. To get into this building I had to submit to a credit, criminal, and background check. If I wanted to live next to a new person every other week, I would have chosen so.
We have condominium boards and neighborhood regulations in place so that if or when there is bad behavior there's recourse against those actions (yes, I know most condo boards would have regulations against renting. Most of the times they wouldn't get involved unless there was an issue though).
One of my neighbors rents out their place on Airbnb almost every other weekend. The tenants are almost always well behaved... unlike an owner that lives on my floor that I've had to have the condo board send a letter to because of late night parties.