You don't need to ban them, just make them meet the same regulations on safety and zoning that regular hotels have to
I agree. A lot of the trouble that Airbnb causes can be mitigated with simple regulations that we already have in place. Additionally, we should recognize that Airbnb is currently filling a void in the market that hotels aren't currently filling. There are times when people want to rent a place to stay for a full week or a month and also not have to pay to eat out every night. Airbnb allows you to rent a place that's generally cheaper for longer stays and also provides a basic kitchen including cookware and dishes. Hotels just don't have that unless you pay a premium. The only other thing they offer, which I'm on the fence about, is the ability to rent a place in close proximity or directly in a specific neighborhood or town as opposed to whatever area has a hotel to host tourists. On the one hand, that's super nice for exploring cities and doing non-touristy things. On the other hand, residents deserve some separation from tourists especially since they don't all behave. If hotels can find a way to fill these gaps, then I'd be ok with banning Airbnb. But we can also just regulate Airbnb 🤷
I feel like several advantages of Airbnb comes specifically from the lack of regulation. I'm speculating, but I imagine installing kitchens and maintaining them costs quite a lot as a hotel, with probably stricter and more expensive regulations compared to an Airbnb. I wouldn't be surprised if Airbnbs were regulated similarly to hotels, that they'd be priced higher due to all the costs. It doesn't make sense to me that a hotel, with 10s or hundreds of units, where not all units have to be rented out at once, is more expensive than a single property home where the whole unit must be rented out at once, and it takes up a bigger space. not to mention the inefficiency of repairs, and cleaning.
I used to work away a lot, an airbnb was always a considered option - even when my meals were paid for. Sometimes you want to have a place to chill at for the week, not just a room.
Saying that though I generally didn't use airbnb for this, booking.com often has holiday lets as well - or better yet go directly to the owner's website.
I think the convenience and the swollen price tag of Airbnb offers particular issue. In my mind Airbnb exploits an issue with a lack of landlords not offering leases with full year of commitment requirements. Nobody is forcing a landlord to set a minimum year of occupancy, that's just the culture we have. That additional markup for having a short term rental is what incentivizes the market to pledge houses towards people who want to travel on a budget.
When I was living in Japan it was fairly normal to find short term rentals that were basically just regular rentals. You weren't charged hotel prices for them, they cost the same as every other rental just you basically gave them a ballpark for how long you intended to stay as a courtesy to them or gave your month's moving notice as needed. If you wanted to just keep staying there as a regular renter that was normal too. There were even small businesses that served as convenient rental realtors who smoothed the process between owners and renter so you could set things up by phone or email to take the key and possession of the apartment.
Airbnb isn't the only thing disruptive to the housing supply... It's in part our entire culture of assuming a difference between short and long term renters and gouging short term renters because we assume that a low income person who is a short term leaser is going to ruin the places they live due to class prejudge. Long term lease requirements lock people living paycheck to paycheck down into situations that subject them to abusive landlords and the lack of flexibility means additional stress and impairment of freedom to move when something is desperately not working.
Most extendedstay hotel locations have kitchenettes, but aren’t that common.
Another way you could handle that is that any property you own after your 1st or 2nd, automatically attracts commercial property tax rates.
That should not disallow private individual to rent a spare room, or holiday home, but it will kill off the investment businesses that specialise running airbnb syndicates.
Additionally, if a property has not had a full time occupant for at least 9 of the 12 months in a year, it is subject to a wealth tax based on its value.
That should deal with the investment firms that just sit on massive stocks of empty homes and business properties, feeding off the increasing prices they are creating themselves, while adding no value and offering no service.
Taxing the owners will just cause the prices to go up to compensate, unless the tax is a very significant burden. Short-term rentals are way more expensive than long-term leases, and so they are much more profitable. A landlord can make three times as much money on airbnb as they would make on a yearly lease.
Also kick the CEO and everybody in his general vicinity in the nuts. This should be law.
Tough, but fair
Everyone who says "ban them" seems like they have never left the US. In Europe and Latin America, there are a ton of other websites that locals use for the same thing. Before the web, you would call up a few places listed in a guidebook and rent it over the phone.
I dislike Airbnb because it's expensive. The concept of "renting a room" in a vacation area will never go away. But the idea of $100 cleaning fees, when they just change the sheets and wipe down surfaces (30 minutes total) is dumb.
We're no strangers to it in the US as well, but what AirBnB has allowed is an industry of landlords that have strangled the housing stock in a number of places. It's not the people renting a room in their house that are the issue, it's the people buying apartments and houses specifically as rental property. I remember seeing a photo of LA that had AirBnB properties marked, and it was estimated at around 45% of all housing as being short-term-only rentals.
I live in a condo complex of duplexes in a summer vacation spot that has a limit on the number of units that can be rented out specifically to avoid this kind of problem - they want affordable housing for people who are actually living here, and not properties that are going to sit empty 8 months of the year. They don't care if you rent out a single room or something, but we have a lady who owns a building who doesn't even live in the same state. She has to drive like 4 hours to get here.
Just ban them, they are no reason to exist in housing crisis. That or the owner must live at that address with no other addresses or leins on property
I am not opposed to people renting a room through air bnb. It's the whole house as a business model I don't like.
I rent my spare room on a different service to traveling nurses. It works well for both of us but it's not a business.
what about not allowing companies to buy hundreds of houses as rental property?
It's not just companies. Individuals are also chain buying places. Establish income from airbnb, leverage for their next purchase.
My real estate agent was buying his 3rd airbnb while I was looking 2 years ago. Dude was in his late 20s.
I'm hoping the house of cards comes crumbling down. Been dealing with housing insecurity as my landlord terminated our lease.
Absolutely true.
I work in a highly paid industry and during the 2010-2015, nearly everybody was investing in real estate. Most of the lunchroom talks were about finding properties, showing off our house investments, and speculating if an area would boom. There were startups catered to folks like us to just give them money and they'll handle the cleaning and maintenance.
Then we got distracted by Bitcoin and all other weird things.
Focusing on AirBnB is better in my opinion because of the difference between the two.
A company buying a home to rent still has to rent the property, so they aren't removing the housing supply. In contrast, a person or corporation buying a home to use as an AirBnB is removing housing from the market.
Companies should not own houses. Residents of houses should own their own houses.
Nobody should own someone else's house. A roof over one's head is a basic human right. Not an extortionate investment.
The problem with companies owning hundreds of houses is that they hire property management companies to manage these houses that were built by the lowest bidders and everybody blames each other when something needs to be maintained and the maintenance never gets done and the people living in the houses suffer because they are paying their hard-earned money to these companies while their shoddily-built houses are falling apart.
remember there are real actual humans hiding behind the facade of these corporations, greedy extortionate millionaires & billionaires thriving on exponential dollars from poor people's paychecks, and this needs to be stopped.
What about doing both?
Good. Sorry to every mom and pop who treated housing like an investment, but at least you still have the house. Hope they slash the market 90%. Hope everyone who's been waiting for a decade gets a place to live. Hope opportunistic landlords choke and go bust when they can't pay three mortgages on their tenants' salaries anymore. Housing is a human right.
It's definitely not going to slash it 90% to do that you'd have to make moves to guarantee houses are always losing value, much in the same way cars do, so that you have a thriving used house market for people that can't afford, or don't care, to buy new.
That means either implementing the construction of houses with materials that have a short life, or forcing houses to be torn down after, let's say 50 years.
I'd prefer just getting rid of ownership of property, but i dont know if we are ready for that as a society.
This is basically how it is in Japan and why Tokyo is actually affordable to live in. https://youtu.be/d6ATBK3A_BY
Of course, this might not be implementable anywhere else.
90%? Ha!
Opportunistic landlords? Those are the ones who are going to swoop in and buy everything if it drops 15%.
Everyone waiting for a decade!? Everyone waiting that long who were ever going to own bought 3-4 years ago at record low sub 3% interest rates. That makes more of a difference in what you pay than the price of the house if you're getting a mortgage, which is who you're talking about here.
How about we ban companies like Blackstone from buying up all the auction homes, lightly flipping them and then putting them back on the market as overpriced rentals?
They're a big reason for our housing shortage.
Why not both? Airbnb severely increases prices, and properties bought by corporations do the same. I'm tired of not doing anything because "what about "
Yeah I'd like to still be able to afford a goddamn vacation.
AirBnB isn't even really worth it from a cost perspective:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/are-airbnbs-more-cost-effective-than-hotels
People are suffering by the millions as a result of the housing crisis, and AirBnB is contributing. So fuck AirBnB, it isn't worth the price society pays. No such corporation or service should exist.
What about if we crowdfund a competitor to blackstone that rents out the houses at like a 20% discount to market rate and earmark a portion of rent collected each month for the tenants to have an equity stake in the property. Then more people would want to rent from us and eventually the vampires would lose interest. I wonder if something like that would be possible. Instead of legislating them out, we buy them out. But it does require a critical mass of people willing to set aside a bit of money that they don’t expect a market return on. But maybe if they thought of it more as charity.
You literally just described a Credit Union.
Any industry based on scarce resources or monopolies should be strictly regulated and given profit caps. Land is limited so corporations should not be able to monopolize that land for boundless profits.
It's bizarre. My house makes as much per year as I do.
propertys have more rights than humans
This is less a meme, and more a screenshot of an article
Is there a political Twitter channel?
I wouldn’t even know how to search for one. If you don’t have much following there, nobody will see it.
There are definitely political sublemmies or whatever we call them. But they’re probably full of signals already.
This is a little meme-like I guess. In the sense it’s a thing you look and then realize something or suddenly grok it.
Maybe you mean like a “goofy political posters”. Sort of like political cartoons, but like photo plus comment format.
Now if only they would stop framing the dropping of home prices as a bad thing.
Don't attack the homeless, attack the lack of homes.
Media has a strong monied bias. To be blunt: nobody is publishing or doing journalism for the "I don't have a fixed address" and "I'm flat broke" audiences. You need money to get access to media, and everyone working there is gainfully employed, so it's a safe bet.
And that's clear in this news story. The framing for this story is basically "you're losing money and you may not even know it yet". Declining real-estate "value" means that 2nd mortgage is going to be a lot smaller than you planned. Or maybe you're now upside-down after installing that hot tub.
If you think banning Airbnb is going to solve the housing crisis outside touristic spots, I think you might be in for a rude awakening.
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale. Probably lots of rentals with landlords not in it for profit, think Vienna-style.
All landlords are in it for the profit. They should instead do more condominiums, so you can own the space you live in. We shouldn't have to live the rest of our lives paying rent.
Government-owned apartments don't need to have a profit-focus, and can instead have a service-focus.
You'll still be paying continuously for a condominium - there are plenty of things related to living in one of those that aren't free. Having an ownership-focused model of housing and incentivizing as such comes with a whole host of undesirable problems as well, so it's not strictly speaking a silver bullet. That being said, housing coops can under the right circumstances be a force for good.
True, but he means nationalized, so publicly owned, publicly funded.
Not only is rent there seen as temporary ownership (same in Germany), with really strong protections but the rent itself is like $300-$400 euros a month, barely anything for a top tier apartment that's basically a solarpunk megabuilding.
I honestly think that's preferable to paying mortgages for also for-profit banks and 'climbing the ladder'.
The lack of ownership as an option also prevents the accumulation of such wealth that someone can buy it all out and make it all worse again
Most landlords. I was a landlord for a while because I was underwater on my mortgage, I had just gotten divorced, and I wanted to move closer to work. I rented the house out at a loss so I could afford an apartment.
So...instead of paying rent to the landlord, people will be paying a mortgage to the bank?
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale.
This sounds like cyberpunk megabuildings
It's more like lots of rowhouses and like 5-10 story apartment mixed-use apartment buildings - hardly a cyberpunk kind-of deal.
An interesting thing is that megabuildings only make sense in the most extreme of circumstances, think Manhattan-levels of location desirability. After a while, adding more floors becomes exponentially more expensive because of the new engineering challenges. Hence it's rarely worth it.
My hope is that it wouldn't be as bad as one might think. Dense living arrangements are more profitable for cities and local businesses and can allow cities to focus on infrastructure improvement and welfare. A problem with the megabuildings could be if they are solely owned by megacorps, but hopefully people will start looking into housing cooperatives to reduce costs and put more power in the hands of tenants. It doesn't have to be like we only build skyscrapers either, but imo we need to have more of a gradient in terms of building height depending on distance to the city center; different apartment building heights have their own benefits. This is just my dream, though.
Except right now, we have enough housing for every person in the country. We just don't have them filled because it's not profitable. Lowering the incentives companies or individuals have for buying houses to keep them empty will ABSOLUTELY curb the rampant housing prices.
Buying houses to keep empty is mostly a land speculation-kind of deal, probably best solved by something like a Land Value-Tax.
Back to the claim though, I'm highly skeptical that the U.S would have a huge surplus of houses in areas where there truly is demand for people to live, i.e. larger cities.
This is an unpopular opinion especially with Americans. But, we are building houses for private ownership like it can be infinite but on a finite earth. This is inevitably rising the prices.
With the Vienna model, people can afford a rent and we resolve the prive ownership issue.
Is this what responsible governments do? I would have figured that Airbnb and the
gamblersinvestors in the housing market would havebribedlobbied hard against this.gamblersinvestorsSCALPERSThey have but local governments report to the local people. Airbnb doesn’t drive the economy like people living in the homes.
I don't like AirBNB and still think they should be banned, but not sure that what the graphic is stating has really panned out in Palm Springs.
According to Redfin, median Palm Springs home sale prices had appeared to drop by about $200k in Sept 2023 (to around $500k), but within two months they were right back close to where they had been before. They're sitting at about +18.4% year-over-year for median home sale prices. Given that alot of the properties for sale still appear to be in the millions, I'm not sure that they're representative of what we see in the rest of the country. There may be other data points out there that paint a different picture, that's just the first thing I looked up.
Makes sense to me, AirBNB is just one piece of the puzzle, get rid of them and they'll just sell their investments to a different group that's driving up prices. You've gotta completely overhaul home ownership and the housing market such that it exists in order to make speculative investment no longer a thing if you want to actually solve the underlying problem.
Additionally if the housing market was in free fall that would impact the tax revenue of the city. Not saying we don't want to do it, but there are going to be consequences.
City taxes are typically part of the budget and property values determine how much you pay in relation to other properties in the city, not how much your house costs. Say the city budget is $1,000,000 and 100 houses in the city (total), and they’re all equal value. Each house pays $10,000 in property taxes regardless of the value being $100,000or $1,000,000 per house.
Hyperbole and simplification done to make an easy explanation.
I only just now noticed that the AirB&B logo looks like a vagina with balls
Airbnbussy
I was recently in palm springs, and not only is it among the shittiest-vibe towns I've visited, with some of the worst restaurants I've been to anywhere in California, I saw a depressing, near windowless, one-story home with no yard for sale at $3M. Their market made absolutely zero sense, I feel like this was inevitable, especially after speculative building during the pandemic.
Did you see that NYPD restaurant along the strip? I partially vomited in the back of my throat.
Lol yep, what a weird freaking place
Did sites like VRBO for vacation and large house rentals exist for AirBnb? I didn't really book those at that point. While I agree airbnb should probably be replaced by hotels (like in the past) was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
AirBNB used to be about just renting a room in your house out to people. Before it got big it wasn't for being a multi-property short-term landord.
Actually, vrbo was more like that - vrbo was around long before airbnb and was meant to be a way to help market your short term rental or like rent your vacation house out while you werent using it.
The problem is they each fill a niche, the need for short term accommodation with privacy for a group, but its super easy to take advantage and start listing huge numbers of properties to make lots of money if youre a
leechlandlord - which is part of why we're in such a bad situation now with the housing market.Generally was a localized market thing.l as far as I am aware.
Things like cottage towns or ski resorts would have local companies that managed places in that area, taking a cut, but also doing things like ensuring lack of unit damage between tenants, cleaning, going after Olympians after they spin up a $400 phone bill to their BF in France while staying in a unit to train. (She apologized profusely and immediately paid the bill.)
was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
Do a web search for "extended stay hotel" or "hotel suites".
You can get two hotel rooms if you have more people than fit into one room. You can rent bigger rooms from hotels too.
When I was a kid in like... the 90s, we stayed in this hotel room that was like... 2 stories tall and had like.... a living room and stuff. And it wasn't even a touristy city. I don't know what that kind of hotel room is called, but it was pretty sweet.
I'm surprised more hotels haven't realized that some folks want that larger rental experience and haven't opened up more larger hotel rooms with kitchens and stuff. Perhaps it's not as profitable. Or maybe hotels don't want to hire someone to properly clean something like that, and hotels don't get to force you to pay them to clean it after having you clean it yourself like Airbnbs do.
Yeah, I've seen those but not ideal. We have a group that gets together at least yearly with about a dozen people. Beds are needed but general living space that can accommodate all of that as well. I've never seen that kind of thing in a hotel.
a bit earlier than that, back when i was a kid.. when we needed more space for more people for whatever was going on, it was always multiple rooms (adjoining, usually) at the holiday inn (in our town. only one with an indoor pool at the time) or at embassy suites (when we were in the cities).
La times article about it (may be a pay wall) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-23/palm-springs-capped-airbnb-rentals-now-some-home-prices-are-in-free-fall
This seems like a good thing. 1.5 million dollar homes aren't selling well? Maybe cheaper homes or apartments will have better mass appeal.
Was there no housing crisis before AirBnB?
There was but AirBNB et al made it worse. The other piece of it is private equity firms buying up homes and using them for long term rentals.
"entrepreneurs" were going out and buying houses en masse to put on airbnb, turning long term homes into short term rentals with exorbitant prices.
There was one before, but AirBNB and shit like it made it magnitudes worse.
Omg, best news story of the day. This brought me a shit ton of joy.
You can ban the company, but you can't ban the concept (which has been around forever)
The concept is great. The company has caused untold damage to the housing market.
Why would you be unable to ban the concept?
You can. Look at what Singapore is doing.
Same thing happened in Vancouver with people’s utility closets when it became illegal to rent out utility closets short term (already was illegal long term)
It didn’t help home prices but the million dollar closets became worthless
Gorgeism would solve this
It’s a step.
Do people really think that AirBnB invented short term rentals?
They didn't invent them, but they revolutionized them, and made it a million times easier for landlords to find short-term tenants.
They made it convenient and common. Short term rental without a platform specifically made to do it is a pain in the ass.
While I have little doubt that AirBnB contributes to the housing crisis, it is not the sole or biggest cause.
Based on?
Just look at the amount of money private equity puts into buying homes. Most of these homes will go for rentals or airbnbs. So they are related, but airbnb itself is the symptom, not the root of the problem.
I still think that instead of banning perfectly valid use cases of housing to lower prices (forcefully decreasing demand), we should focus more on just building more stock to satisfy all needs?
And before someone says "we can do both!" we aren't. The majority of attention is going to things like this, and corporate investment (which is valid, tbh).
The more houses they build the more airbnbs there will be.
The reality is that there are enough empty houses to house everyone who needs them, the problem is that those who own them either want them empty as a holiday home they can later sell as an investment, or rented out, as an investment.
Because that's what housing is today.
Which is why the only real solution is to decommodify housing, since it's a human right and should be treated as such, while the profits of the rich are not, and should not.
If you build more houses, what is to stop someone with capital using them to airbnb? Unless you are going to flood the market with SO many houses that airbnbs become too competitive to be profitable we end up in the same scenario. And that level of building seems kind of ridiculous.
SO many houses that airbnbs become too competitive to be profitable we end up in the same scenario. And that level of building seems kind of ridiculous.
Why is that? It's simple market dynamics. Supply goes up to meet demand until they hit equilibrium. Works for almost everything else, why not houses? I think it would happen faster than you think, as prices go down and your airbnb is sitting empty for 3/4 of the year, suddenly it stops being such a good investment. Houses are only a good investment because we artificially made them into that.
Fuck yes, give me more price discovery absent speculation
