Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and local government policy had not already guaranteed those outcomes.
Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up.
This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.
The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic.
I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.
As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans.
AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more.
BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
There are many factors, and Abnb can be one of them, but it’s not the only read. Zoning laws, economic landscape of the town, etc all play into to the lack of affordable housing. I would posit NIMBYism and zoning are likely the biggest ones.
AirBnB rentals are not making it criminal to build supply, local zoning regulations that benefit incumbents at the expense of everyone else are what make it criminal to build supply.
It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property ownership, and democracy.
> Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people
That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have accelerated the issue rather than caused it.
> Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.
Oh please. NIMBYs ruined home ownership. Airbnb certainly hasn't had zero contribution to higher home prices, but abolishing short-term rentals hasn't fixed affordability issues anywhere it's been done.
As an aside, I own a home and now merely dream that renting should be as cheap as owning. Having equity in something that needs constant repair, loses heat on all sides, and has a bunch of fucking grass around it, is only equivalent to a certain amount of cash.
I suspect the real reason owning is cheap is not that it's inherently better, but because everything is cheaper when you have lots of money.
When I read stuff like this, I'm left wondering if I'm the only person who actually lives in a place that has been infested with Airbnb. On paper, my neighborhood is the Hacker News dreamland. Nobody has a yard. There is train service. Many people don't have cars. There is no mandatory parking allowance. There is no zoning restriction against multifamily housing. Virtually every unit is at least attached. Multi-use is fine. Plenty of buildings contain both housing and businesses. There isn't a lot of traffic. It's walkable. The only major restriction is you can't build higher than five stories. And we've been in a construction boom for nearly a decade.
But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra.
With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
> It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-term rentals will not move the needle on housing affordability.
It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%, and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
I thought the original idea of Airbnb was to open a spare room in the house you already own to guests. I've used it only in this way and it really helped with a financial crunch, and given that I lived there and was present while guests where there, there was no negative impact to the community at all. I know people have been buying houses just for Airbnb rental, but that's not everyone.
If anything, there is a housing cartel that we need an Uber-like blitz (times a million) to destroy. In the same way that Uber ignored local taxi regulations, you would need to ignore local zoning regulations. Just "build, baby, build", become valuable, and then, with your fait-accompli in hand, bribe the various local governments -- just like Uber.
Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
I live in Lisbon. Over 80% of housing units in the historic Alfama neighborhood are now vacation rentals. This is the most historically Portuguese neighborhood in the capital. It was the only neighborhood to survive the earthquake in 1755. Fado was born there.
Yes, it's a failure of government policy, but I don't think it's hyperbole to say that AirBnB and its ilk destroyed that community. That is, assuming you define "community" as a group of people and not a group of buildings.
> Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities"
it has absolutely done so in the same way that a bunch of motels springing up in your neighborhood would completely change it and not necessarily for the better
it also greatly constrained the availability of housing for locals, therefore pushing up prices, so that people not living in the city could visit for cheaper; probably ok if you're in the tourism business, otherwise not
Sure, but if someone started running heavy industrial concrete equipment in a residential zoned block 24/7, than the city wouldn't be blaming poor people for the issues.
The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services running out of residential zoned homes.
Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer" convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
Yeah I'm tired of this too. Real estate hyperinflation is almost entirely the fault of chronically under-building real estate due to regulatory capture by landlords, legacy homeowners, and speculators. The real estate market is more or less a cartel in quite a few places.
AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but only because supply is so absurdly tight.
100% of code uses 100% of resources. Let's not downplay the role of Airbnb as both a company and a phenomena for causing inflation. But more than that, remember that a lot happens at the margins in these markets: what's actually liquid or in play is a small part of the overall stock. So anything that messes with that will have an outsized effect.
You can define it as under-building, but that's only one side of the political effect. E.g. the UK net immigration rate has been pretty enormous, and it seems lopsided to call it under-building to have not built homes for a giant number of people coming from their previous homes elsewhere in the world to the UK.
Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant, for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I am doing the same.
sgdfhijfgsdfgds|1 year ago
This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.
The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
etothepii|1 year ago
I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.
lacy_tinpot|1 year ago
As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans.
AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more.
BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
robertlagrant|1 year ago
EasyMark|1 year ago
Hammershaft|1 year ago
It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property ownership, and democracy.
TrainedMonkey|1 year ago
That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have accelerated the issue rather than caused it.
> Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.
eddd-ddde|1 year ago
kelnos|1 year ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF|1 year ago
I suspect the real reason owning is cheap is not that it's inherently better, but because everything is cheaper when you have lots of money.
nonameiguess|1 year ago
But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra.
With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
jovial_cavalier|1 year ago
fire_lake|1 year ago
It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
kelnos|1 year ago
But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-term rentals will not move the needle on housing affordability.
It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%, and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
Spivak|1 year ago
https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/new-nyc-data-shows-th...
RiverCrochet|1 year ago
FooBarBizBazz|1 year ago
Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
remyp|1 year ago
Yes, it's a failure of government policy, but I don't think it's hyperbole to say that AirBnB and its ilk destroyed that community. That is, assuming you define "community" as a group of people and not a group of buildings.
insane_dreamer|1 year ago
it has absolutely done so in the same way that a bunch of motels springing up in your neighborhood would completely change it and not necessarily for the better
it also greatly constrained the availability of housing for locals, therefore pushing up prices, so that people not living in the city could visit for cheaper; probably ok if you're in the tourism business, otherwise not
Joel_Mckay|1 year ago
The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services running out of residential zoned homes.
Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer" convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
api|1 year ago
AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but only because supply is so absurdly tight.
Blackthorn|1 year ago
robertlagrant|1 year ago
Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant, for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I am doing the same.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]