NYC, Facing Housing Crisis, Targets Illegal Airbnb Owners (nytimes.com) 83
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Airbnb recently announced that it had its best quarter ever, reflecting a surging thirst for travel and tourism as the pandemic's grip loosens. But in New York City, the company is at the center of a different narrative: City leaders, after fighting for years to limit the proliferation of illegal short-term rentals, are poised to impose more stringent restrictions on the online platform. The City Council on Thursday is expected to approve a bill that would for the first time require hosts to register with the city before renting out their homes on a short-term basis or for less than 30 days. The measure mirrors regulations in other cities like Boston and Santa Monica, Calif.
In New York City, one of Airbnb's biggest domestic markets, city officials and housing advocates have long complained that landlords and tenants have exacerbated the housing crisis by circumventing laws and setting aside homes to rent out for a few days at a time to tourists or other visitors. Short-term rentals are often more lucrative than long-term leases. And the hotel industry, which has been decimated by the pandemic, has long complained about Airbnb and similar online rental companies, accusing them of siphoning away business. The new bill is designed to prevent rentals that violate those laws -- including a New York State law that largely bars apartment rentals for less than 30 days when the host is not present -- from even appearing online. Supporters said the new restrictions could lead to the gradual removal of thousands of listings for such illegal rentals from short-term rental websites.
The bill's supporters said New York's proposed law had been designed to ensure compliance because it requires online rental platforms like Airbnb to verify that a listing has been properly registered with the city before the platform can collect any fees. Fines for hosts who fail to abide by the rule could be up to $5,000, and platforms like Airbnb could be fined $1,500 for every illegal transaction. [...] It's not clear exactly how many of the listings in New York City are illegal, and the effectiveness of the new bill will depend in part on how well the city enforces the new law. In places like Santa Monica, Boston and San Francisco, data has shown a modest to significant decrease in the number of listings after a registration system went into place. Based on the number of listings advertising short-term rentals for entire homes or apartments in the city, suggesting a host may not be present, supporters of the bill estimate that up to roughly 19,000 Airbnb listings could be illegal and eventually delisted. "According to data from Inside Airbnb, an independent data-tracking website, there were more than 37,700 Airbnb listings in New York City at the beginning of November 2021," the report notes. "That was significantly below the prepandemic level of more than 49,200 in November 2019."
Stephen Smith, a co-founder of real estate firm Quantierra, said the bill would not do enough to stem the city's housing crisis. "These politicians seem to think that this is going to do something for affordability, and in fact it's likely to do very little," he said. The combination of the bill along with another city initiative to curb new hotel development could greatly reduce the number of affordable places visitors to the city can stay, Mr. Smith said. "If you really make it difficult enough for people to come to New York, they're going to stop coming to New York," he said.
In New York City, one of Airbnb's biggest domestic markets, city officials and housing advocates have long complained that landlords and tenants have exacerbated the housing crisis by circumventing laws and setting aside homes to rent out for a few days at a time to tourists or other visitors. Short-term rentals are often more lucrative than long-term leases. And the hotel industry, which has been decimated by the pandemic, has long complained about Airbnb and similar online rental companies, accusing them of siphoning away business. The new bill is designed to prevent rentals that violate those laws -- including a New York State law that largely bars apartment rentals for less than 30 days when the host is not present -- from even appearing online. Supporters said the new restrictions could lead to the gradual removal of thousands of listings for such illegal rentals from short-term rental websites.
The bill's supporters said New York's proposed law had been designed to ensure compliance because it requires online rental platforms like Airbnb to verify that a listing has been properly registered with the city before the platform can collect any fees. Fines for hosts who fail to abide by the rule could be up to $5,000, and platforms like Airbnb could be fined $1,500 for every illegal transaction. [...] It's not clear exactly how many of the listings in New York City are illegal, and the effectiveness of the new bill will depend in part on how well the city enforces the new law. In places like Santa Monica, Boston and San Francisco, data has shown a modest to significant decrease in the number of listings after a registration system went into place. Based on the number of listings advertising short-term rentals for entire homes or apartments in the city, suggesting a host may not be present, supporters of the bill estimate that up to roughly 19,000 Airbnb listings could be illegal and eventually delisted. "According to data from Inside Airbnb, an independent data-tracking website, there were more than 37,700 Airbnb listings in New York City at the beginning of November 2021," the report notes. "That was significantly below the prepandemic level of more than 49,200 in November 2019."
Stephen Smith, a co-founder of real estate firm Quantierra, said the bill would not do enough to stem the city's housing crisis. "These politicians seem to think that this is going to do something for affordability, and in fact it's likely to do very little," he said. The combination of the bill along with another city initiative to curb new hotel development could greatly reduce the number of affordable places visitors to the city can stay, Mr. Smith said. "If you really make it difficult enough for people to come to New York, they're going to stop coming to New York," he said.
Why go through all the trouble? (Score:4, Interesting)
All they have to do is classify anyone who rents or leases the home/apartment they own as a hotel or landlord, depending on length of stay. Generally five days or less is a hotel.
Everyone must register and file the appropriate taxes.
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Everyone must register and file the appropriate taxes.
And have the appropriate insurance for running a hotel. And equip their hotel with the appropriate fire prevention and suppression technologies.
Re: Why go through all the trouble? (Score:2)
The solution is counterintuitive. More Airbnb, less investment housing. NYC has enough housing, the problem is it is own by people who do not live there. The 1%
Re: Why go through all the trouble? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it will do no good for the residents of NYC
Airbnb has made a business out of enabling its customers to unilaterally monetize the peace, safety and wellbeing of their neighbors. Clamping down on residential properties being turned into unlicensed hotels will greatly benefit many of the residents of New York City.
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But in this context, we need an incentive for property inside the city to be occupied and utilized, not investment and vacation property for the 1%.
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Occupied and utilized is important to city planning (especially rent controlled units), but occupied at what threshold? Many people have second homes not as a trophy, but for some practical reasons. The justifiable threshold might even be less than 10%; about 30 days per year and you start to want enough of your own stuff in a place that you don’t feel like you are living out of a hotel.
Likewise, buying to renovate and then occupy is a common situation that leaves units unoccupied. Getting to the poi
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It is true that these rentals can make a neighborhood less safe.
How so? Do you have crime statistics that can positively correlate crime with prevalence of this type of rentals? Or are you assuming that the unscrupulous type use AirBnB properties?
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The solution is counterintuitive. More Airbnb, less investment housing. NYC has enough housing, the problem is it is own by people who do not live there. The 1%
Given most New Yorkers hate people that have an arbitrarily chosen number for their income, why don't you guys just vote them out? I.e. pass a referendum so that all income above $200k per year is taxed at 100%, effectively placing an income cap. Then there can't be a 1%. NYC itself already has its own income tax, shouldn't be too hard, especially since 99% of you obviously outnumber the rest.
I don't live anywhere near NY so this won't affect me in any economic sense. But at least you guys will finally stop
Re: Why go through all the trouble? (Score:1)
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With all the people that left the state and NYC during covid, with lockdowns, etc....I would think they have plenty of housing available.
Perhaps this is with tax revenues falling due to less people there, and with lockdowns/mandates cramping business, this is just a way for govt. to try to squeeze out more money from those left there still?
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How about an ABC affiliate in NY?
https://abc7ny.com/nyc-exodus-... [abc7ny.com]
"No one" is pretty absolute, so by default, that is wrong. Even better, there is actual evidence that many did leave, so you are in total wrong.
Re: Why go through all the trouble? (Score:2)
You misspelled Hotel Lobby with deep pockets bribe politicians to stop people from renting their homes.
Re: Why go through all the trouble? (Score:1)
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Again the proposals in most cities with a housing crisis are only there to promote the inefficiency of hotels
The "inefficiency" of hotels exist for the same reason as the "inefficiency" of taxi services. They are very much the same as the "inefficiency" of the FDA mandating food safety standards at a restaurant, or the mandating drug safety standards for when you visit the doctor.
Not all inefficiencies are bad.
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Are changes even needed? (Score:2)
AirBNB already turns over data [airbnb.com] on listings and hosts to the NYC government for short-term rentals.
AirBNB also collects occupancy tax [airbnb.com] for listings in New York State (though curiously the NYC counties are missing from the list).
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Registering means they can regulate them much more easily. Taxes mean they have money to deal with the problems that arise.
All that makes it less attractive too, so less AirBNB and more housing available to people who actually want to live there.
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Honestly, the problem overall with AirBnB is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem of "landlording"
Yes, landlords and rentals should exist, but they should only ever exist as commercial, self-contained buildings.
The typical "hotel" should be arranged as such
2 floors of stores and offices, 4 floors for staff, and then 16 floors of "hotel space only" followed by 2 floors of hotel-only services (eg laundry, vending machines, etc) and then repeat at a ratio of 1 floor for staff for every 4 floors of hotel
Nah (Score:2)
"If you really make it difficult enough for people to come to New York, they're going to stop coming to New York," he said.
This might be part of the goal.
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Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded.
(That joke is often associated with Yogi Berra, but it predates him.)
The solution to a housing crisis is more housing (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right, of course. But "build more houses" is easier said than done.
There are quite a lot of people who don't want new houses to be built, and apply political leverage whenever possible to prevent it. They are: current homeowners. They get all happy when property values rise because they become wealthier. Building more houses would pull their property values down, which would make them poorer. Since they see their house as a financial investment, they absolutely do NOT want to see its value go down.
On the other hand, maybe in New York city, it is so crowded that there aren't any places left to build more housing? If that's the case, then people should leave. Let the high prices drive them out to some place more affordable. We don't all have to live in one city.
Re:Agree. (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, maybe in New York city, it is so crowded that there aren't any places left to build more housing?
There are plenty of places to build on the west side and north of Central Park including Harlem. And that is just Manhatten.
There are tons of potential building sites in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn.
Staten Island is practically rural. It even has Trump supporters.
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There are plenty of places to build on the west side and north of Central Park including Harlem.
Well, yeah. You can bulldoze townhouses and build high-rises, or just plop them inside the Central Park. I bet a condo tower on that empty Sheep Meadow would do great! Never mind that the subways are already stretched thin (and forget about using cars).
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Re:Agree. (Score:4)
Well, it did show a propensity for helping disease spread more efficiently in a pandemic.
Not me, I don't want to share walls...I don't want to have to mind how loud my stereo is and might be annoying my neighbors, nor do I want to be annoyed by their noise.
I like to have a nice back yard where I can have my grill and my smoker (charcoal and wood both)...I like to have my all grain home brew rig and room enough to have friends and family over for crawfish boils.
I like to have room for a vegetable garden.
No...density isn't for everyone and should not be imposed on those that don't wish it.
If you want to have a dense city where everyone is stacked like rats and you have to depend on public transportation, then fine...more power to you.
I should be able to have the options I have now.
It isn't like the US is going to run out of land any time soon, so, there is PLENTY of room for those that want either lifestyle.
Re:Agree. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it did show a propensity for helping disease spread more efficiently in a pandemic.
The pandemic didn't spread initially in New York because of density. It spread there because it got there first. It got there first because it is an international hub, made possible by the economic prosperity of its high density. The extreme spread of Covid to rural and suburban areas shows that density has very little to do with this. Heck, just look at the death totals broken down by each US state https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/ [statista.com]. That's complicated by issues of vaccination rate and a few other things, but the basic point should be clear.
If you want to have a dense city where everyone is stacked like rats and you have to depend on public transportation, then fine...more power to you.
So we're agreed then. People should be allowed to live in the environments they want. So let people in New York build the housing for the people who want to live in dense areas. If you don't like that, you don't have to live there.
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Urban areas can grow as dense as they wish, no problem with that.
I just don't want the govt. to come in and start forcing high density living areas in the established suburban areas that enjoy the benefits of non-dense single family dwellings, which I've been reading is a push the Biden admin is work
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So let people in New York build the housing for the people who want to live in dense areas. If you don't like that, you don't have to live there.
Sounds great! Tell that to the NIMBYs in San Francisco.
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This is simply wrong. Yes, timing was not due to density but to international connectivity, and yes, the rural and surbaban USA have been hit hard in this pandemic. But normal social interaction patterns in a dense city are certainly more naturally conducive to the spread of infection.
People have long pointed to urban centers as a primary driver of pandemics dating back to early civilization and especi
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But normal social interaction patterns in a dense city are certainly more naturally conducive to the spread of infection.
Sure. And I agree with the rest of your essential points. But the upshot is that density is not so much of an issue such that simply taking an issue a little seriously is more than enough to mitigate any density based issue, then density can't matter that much.
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Do you want the value of your house to go down?
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If they did, then they'd get accused of gentrification.
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On the other hand, maybe in New York city, it is so crowded that there aren't any places left to build more housing?
There are plenty of places to build on the west side and north of Central Park including Harlem. And that is just Manhatten.
There are tons of potential building sites in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn.
Staten Island is practically rural. It even has Trump supporters.
Cool, and in a few years the problem will be sorted. In the mean time I guess people should sleep on the streets. No need to do something now which can be done faster than building a new suburb.
People live where the jobs are (Score:2)
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If people would rent a house instead of buying one, then if they had an issue like this, then they could simply move at the end of the lease period. Of course, then they'd have landlords...
Not building, but rezoning (Score:3)
With the popularity of work-from-home, the NYC government should consider rezoning some of the commercial areas as mixed-use/residential. Many, many companies are closing offices or reducing the floor space they rent. The buildings are *already there*, so it'd be good if people who need a place to live could do so in Manhattan.
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The solution to a "housing crisis" is to build more housing.
More housing in NYC? Its infrastructure is already stretched to the breaking point. Manhattan is already among the densest cities on Earth (28000 people per square kilometer, around 5-th place).
The proper way to fix it is to prevent such monstrosities from ever happening. Encourage single-family housing, build hub-and-spokes transit and more highways. Decentralize the industry. Basically, do what the US had been doing in 50-s and what made it the world's leading economy.
Cramming more and more people int
Re:The solution to a housing crisis is more housin (Score:5, Insightful)
More housing in NYC? Its infrastructure is already stretched to the breaking point. Manhattan is already among the densest cities on Earth (28000 people per square kilometer, around 5-th place).
We can go even denser. The only reason any infrastructure is stretched now is because the US has failed to invest in infrastructure at a systematic level. Infrastructure in rural areas is also falling apart all over. Density doesn't have anything to do with that.
Encourage single-family housing, build hub-and-spokes transit and more highways. Decentralize the industry. Basically, do what the US had been doing in 50-s and what made it the world's leading economy.
This is an awful idea. People want to live in cities, and they should have the option of doing so. If someone wants to live in a suburb, they have that option. But preventing them from doing so is bad. Highways make for long, expensive commutes, take up lots of land, and add to pollution. The idea that the US rush to the suburbs is why the US did so well economically in the 1950s is completely incorrect. The US did well economically because much of the rest of the world was devastated by World War II, the US had a massive payoff of scientific research done during the war which transitioned into new technologies, and the US got a great number of scientists and engineers as refugees. The US prospered in the 1950s despite its land-use policies, not because of them. Dense areas like New York produce more economic growth; cities are where people and ideas thrive. There's good reason that more and more people are moving to cities even given the high housing cost.
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People want to live somewhere that has
- Good jobs
- Good schools
- Amenities like shops and parks
- Decent transport links
- Fast broadband
- Affordable, decent homes
That isn't necessarily a city, or an existing city. The problem is that it's difficult to bootstrap new towns because you have a chicken and egg problem. Nobody there, so no jobs and amenities, so nobody wants to live there.
So what tends to happen is people either move to cities where some of those things they want already exist, or new developments
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Someone needs to just get a fiber transit hub going in the middle of nowhere and start a "work from home" city for knowledge workers surrounding the initial data center investment. Low real estate pricing and guaranteed Internet speeds would be the initial draw. The shops and restaurants will probably arrive before the housing is finished being built because the opportunity is there.
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It might work, but if I use myself as an example I'd also be looking for somewhere that my wife would be happy. She doesn't work from home.
Wealth inequality kills the free market solutions. (Score:2)
The solution to a "housing crisis" is to build more housing.
So long as people accumulate a LOT more wealth than you and investing in real estate is profitable, you will always lose that battle. In my area, we have a huge issue with foreign investors buying all the homes they can. For example, Jeff Bezos' net worth can buy 200,000 million dollar homes. With wealth inequality trends, this will only get worse. The top 1% of your community can buy dozens of homes as investment vehicles, ensuring high property taxes and lower tax revenue from other sources, as well a
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Also, you can't build more housing. All the lots are full. There's no vacant lot anywhere near me and nearly every vacant building or lot is slated for a new development. There's no parking. The infrastructure can't really handle a massive vertical buildout.
Walking is a thing. Buses a thing. Trains are a thing. The idea that car parking is somehow needed for every single person is itself part of the problem. Zoning forces every lot to have massive space taken up by parking. Instead, just let people build it out, and people without a need for cars will use it. For example, my spouse and I don't own a car. But in every single one of our apartments we've been at we've had at least one parking space earmarked to us (and sometimes two). Absolute waste of good space
Cars are as important as internet (Score:2)
Walking is a thing. Buses a thing. Trains are a thing. The idea that car parking is somehow needed for every single person is itself part of the problem. Zoning forces every lot to have massive space taken up by parking. Instead, just let people build it out, and people without a need for cars will use it. For example, my spouse and I don't own a car. But in every single one of our apartments we've been at we've had at least one parking space earmarked to us (and sometimes two). Absolute waste of good space.
I walk daily. Pre-pandemic, I biked to work every day. It's great. Try having kids without a car. It gets a lot tougher. Do we need it? I suppose many survive without cars, just as many survive without internet. If you live in a city with winters, good luck without a car once kids are in the equation.
What you're missing is that you & your spouse, who I am guessing are childless, are one portion of the community. In order for a community to thrive, it needs to be more than D.I.N.K. yuppie cou
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I live in a place with acceptable transit by local standards, but it's nearly useless to me.
Just to get to my son's basketball practices and games we have to drive over 200 miles a week, almost all of it in an adjacent county with no public transportation of any kind.
I could use it to get to and from work, which are among the reasons we moved here and why I took the job I did. But it would take up to 90 minutes if the buses were on time, which they usually aren't. Each way. The drive is 9 minutes in the
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Huh. Northeast Ohio (Cleveland) area here. We have a few pockets of this same kind of thing. Unremarkable houses and apartments including some in bad neighborhoods, selling quickly at 3-5x the area-wide average, and many of them remaining seemingly vacant. Some new, some rehabbed and flipped. I've yet to meet a single person living in one.
But what's killing me right now, in my solidly middle-class inner suburb, is that aside from calling on friends from time to time, I can't get good contractors. At a
One of the most fucked up things we do (Score:3)
Easy enough to circumvent ... (Score:2)
(1) Advertise on social media to one's circle of friends of friends.
(2) Take cash up front.
This is how I usually found short-term (> 30 days, but still short term) tenants for my place if I was traveling for the summer.
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This is true, but I feel like they're more worried about the folks who rent their place out year round, and friends-of-friends doesn't seem like a big enough pool to keep a place occupied enough to beat just renting it out normally.
NYC is Too Big (Score:2)
Go somewhere else.
NYC has come full circle with its Death Wish past (Score:3, Interesting)
By almost every conceivable benchmark, even his own, de Blasio has failed. Mayor Eric Adams has his work cut out for him, but Giuliani and Bloomberg have shown that it’s possible to actually govern the city.
https://www.nationalreview.com... [nationalreview.com]
The New York renaissance that began with the election of Rudy Giuliani in 1993 and continued through the end of Michael Bloomberg’s three-term mayoralty two decades later was literally that. When babies were born in New York City, parents stayed if they could afford to instead of fleeing because they had to. An aging city suddenly turned younger. Areas that had lain fallow were reborn. Despite, or perhaps because of, the 9/11 attacks and the surge of citizen pride that accompanied them, the 2000s saw still more people flowing into the five boroughs. Half a million souls, to be exact; the population rose to 8.5 million.
New York might have been the most expensive city in the country to live in, a bastion of income inequality and every other sin of wealth that the young people who flooded to hipster Brooklyn to eat food twice as expensive as they would have paid for it anywhere else found time to worry over on their blogs — but as their presence indicated, it was the place to be.
And what of the decade dominated by Bill de Blasio’s eight years as mayor? When he leaves office in January 2022, the population of New York City will likely be around 8.25 million. He will not only leave office with the city in far worse shape than it was when he became its chief executive in 2014; he is the key cause of its renewed depopulation.
As usual, when you subsidize something, you get more of it — and in 2020, nearly 21,000 individuals were sleeping nightly in public shelters, an all-time high. When the vagrants are not in the shelters, they’re on the streets, sleeping or raging or rampaging, degrading the daily life of the city’s working residents and their children.
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There won't be conservative or even centrist leadership in NYC anytime soon, and, even if there were, the city has a LONG tradition of being ruled by special interests, many of them more powerful now than ever, and you will have to have their buy-in to do much of anything useful.
Having said that, I'm as hopeful regarding Eric Adams' upcoming tenure as I could be about anyone's. He's a Democrat who's willing to go against the far-far-far left, which a Republican would never get away with. Time will tell wh
Is This Really About Real Estate Prices? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be much happier if NYC went after Airbnb and Vrbo for the insanely high hidden fees that you don't discover until you're almost done booking the place. They shouldn't be allowed to advertise prices that are so deceptively low when the actual price is so much higher.
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then I would expect them to be doing more to combat corporate investment companies who are slurping up real estate all over the place
Good luck passing a law in America that determines who can and can't buy a house. I think we'll see mandatory vaccines and the revocation of the second amendment before you manage to decide who can and can't own a house.
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We simply go back to what Jefferson, Paine, Smith, Adams, and others wanted: Property is the sole right of an individual tangible human being or family. No non-human may own residential property with the sole exclusion of on-site managed purpose-built rental housing with stringent requirements.
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Yeah a great idea that has a lot in common of other ideas from the founding fathers: They made sense in the 1800s.
The way you just wrote your sentence precludes a bank from giving someone who isn't wealthy enough to buy a house for cash a loan as the security couldn't be overtaken on default. When talking in legal terms be careful how you right and don't speak in absolutes. You'll end up upending society in the process.
Mind you I should say I agree with you. Something needs to be done. You just have no hope
Denver had this issue.... (Score:3, Informative)
The workaround (Score:1)
Add and then remove each visitor to the lease. Problem solved. I saw this at Airbnbs in Sacramento and Austin.
Also: Freedom to rent (Score:2)
I understand that housing crises exist but that's not the problem of an individual property owner. They should be able to choose arrangements of who stays at their property.
If there isn't enough housing inventory, then override NIMBYs and build more, but don't punish property owners.
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They are able choose who stays at their property -- for free, say friends or relatives. But once they start charging money, it becomes a business and cities have every right to regulate businesses within their borders.
Just because you're a property owner doesn't mean you can do whatever you want on your property.
Freedom to owners = better long-term economy (Score:1)
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I'd love that. But this is New York. It's not gonna happen anytime soon.
Before it's even a possibility, you need to teach New Yorkers the value of limited government, free enterprise, and rule of law. And the fact that so much of the heartland ("flyover country") is solidly pro-Trump, rather than pro-genuine-conservative, indicates that even there, those principles are not fully understood. Don't get me wrong; Trump was infinitely better on these issues than any prominent Democrat. But still far from w
target rent control instead (Score:2)
The state of NY is solely responsible for this mess.
Leftist Autocracy (Score:2)
For some reason, the Left's solution to everything is to just make more things illegal, rather than create an actual solution.
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For some reason, the Left's solution to everything is to just make more things illegal, rather than create an actual solution.
They'd have to do things like arrest and get rid of illegal aliens. Put criminals in jail. Things that we used to do when we got what we paid for.
Dunno why anyone would live in NYC now. Your life isn't worth a nickel.