New York Now Has More Airbnb Listings Than Apartments For Rent (curbed.com) 205
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Curbed: The fever isn't breaking. There are now bidding wars for one in every five Manhattan rental apartments (and one in three luxury units), according to the most recent Douglas Elliman report. Inventory in all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and northwest Queens has been hovering well below 10,000 units -- as of April, the number was just 7,669. Which is several thousand less than the number of entire-apartment and entire-home Airbnb rentals available in New York City right now: 10,572, according to AirDNA, a third-party site that tracks short-term rentals. Inside Airbnb, another site that scrapes Airbnb for listings data, puts the number even higher, at 20,397.
Ever since Airbnb came on the scene in 2008, there have been concerns that the short-term-rental company would deplete the housing stock by sucking up available rooms, causing prices to rise in cities like New York and San Francisco, where there were already severe housing shortages. The absolute number of available apartments and houses on the site peaked before the pandemic and has since dropped back, according to both Inside Airbnb and AirDNA. But there's a difference now: There are just so few apartments to be had that Airbnbs make up the majority of the city's available rentals. The company doesn't release listings or bookings data and wouldn't comment on the data collected by AirDNA and Inside Airbnb. They did however confirm that its NYC listing inventory has fallen since the start of the pandemic, citing factors that may have contributed to the housing shortage but weren't related to Airbnb.
"Over the past two years, our entire space listing supply citywide has decreased, and it now represents a fraction of a percent of the city's rental units -- and all while rent prices have trended upward and city-issued permits for new-unit development remain down by a double-digit percentage," a spokesperson for the company wrote. Curbed notes that this number is "somewhat gamed," adding: "Airbnb is comparing its inventory to the total number of rental units in New York, not just the available ones, which as of 2017 was 2.18 million. But, of course, only a tiny fraction of those are open in any given year, let alone any given month."
Ever since Airbnb came on the scene in 2008, there have been concerns that the short-term-rental company would deplete the housing stock by sucking up available rooms, causing prices to rise in cities like New York and San Francisco, where there were already severe housing shortages. The absolute number of available apartments and houses on the site peaked before the pandemic and has since dropped back, according to both Inside Airbnb and AirDNA. But there's a difference now: There are just so few apartments to be had that Airbnbs make up the majority of the city's available rentals. The company doesn't release listings or bookings data and wouldn't comment on the data collected by AirDNA and Inside Airbnb. They did however confirm that its NYC listing inventory has fallen since the start of the pandemic, citing factors that may have contributed to the housing shortage but weren't related to Airbnb.
"Over the past two years, our entire space listing supply citywide has decreased, and it now represents a fraction of a percent of the city's rental units -- and all while rent prices have trended upward and city-issued permits for new-unit development remain down by a double-digit percentage," a spokesperson for the company wrote. Curbed notes that this number is "somewhat gamed," adding: "Airbnb is comparing its inventory to the total number of rental units in New York, not just the available ones, which as of 2017 was 2.18 million. But, of course, only a tiny fraction of those are open in any given year, let alone any given month."
the invisible hand of the free market (Score:5, Insightful)
if it's more profitable to AirBNB your property, even though the occupancy rate is on average lower than an apartment with a contract tenant, the highly daily rate of AirBNB could makes up for it. Until of course people stop visiting your screwy libertarian utopia because now nobody lives there and everything is just apartments you can rent for a weekend for a month's salary.
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A thing about Urban living. Everyone needs to live with each other. For an urban environment to prosper there needs to be more rules and regulations, otherwise a lot of bad things can happen very quickly.
Cities are useful part of our national infrastructure, as they are Job hubs, where business being close by can work with each other and compete with each other, knowing what others are doing, with a large dense infrastructure it makes operating more affordable with a public utilities.
Because of their econo
Re: the invisible hand of the free market (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't call for more regulations. I just explained why City life needs more regulations than Rural Life.
NYC has a shortage of Long term dwellings, and setting up AirBnB where they could be rented out as departments, while more profitable, is not good for the city or the community. So unfortunately when Capitalism and the General Good are in conflict, either existing regulations need to be enforced, or alter the regulations to make sure the city doesn't become All Hotels where no one can actually live there.
AirBnB has been in conflict with many existing Zoning regulations for a while, and are often just running on loopholes.
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The Unites States has people with good paying jobs who are homeless because they can't afford housing!
AirBnB should be outlawed. It has clearly made the situation worse, as everyone said it would.
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Utopia is a fiction - one person's utopia is another's dystopia. There is no way you can have a Utopia for all.
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The obvious libertarian solution is to build more apartment buildings to meet the demand. Then there can be both long-term and short-term rentals.
Probability of the government of NYC allowing this to happen: 0%.
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Build more apartments. In NYC. An area already densely packed with apartments. Where land is extremely expensive.
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Because one thing Manhattan has is lots of free space to build new things on!
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Because one thing Manhattan has is lots of free space to build new things on!
Central Park. Will also bring down the prices for the adjacent plots. /s
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Well, as people work more from home, it sounds like there is a good bit of commercial space now being unused that could possibly be repurposed?
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The obvious libertarian solution is to build more apartment buildings to meet the demand.
Where?
Re: the invisible hand of the free market (Score:3)
On top of the remains of older, shorter buildings.
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Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:5, Informative)
The obvious capitalist reaction to that is registering all the new apartments on Airbnb
No. You should take a course on basic economics.
Airbnbs make more money because there are not enough of them to meet demand.
If more construction permits are granted (very unlikely) the market will saturate and profit margins will shrink. Once the margins are no better than long-term rental rates, the owners will shift to long-term rentals, causing long-term rents to fall as well. Once that market is saturated, construction will slow or stop.
Capitalists always prefer high short term profit over lower, but more secure, long term income.
No they don't. Here's your economics lesson for today: Inverted yield curve [wikipedia.org].
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The problem is that you need to first saturate the luxury market, then saturate the AirBnB market, and then what is left is "affordable" rental market. The developers usually take a vacation before the third one with all the profits from the first two.
For the developers, the first two markets are significantly lower short and long-term risk. The only way you reduce the devloper risk is by infilling/reclaiming more land in the river/bay/ocean and selling them the land cheap.
Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that you need to first saturate the luxury market
No you don't. Grocery stores don't just sell caviar. They also sell milk. Likewise, in a free market, builders supply all profitable housing markets.
The reason that builders currently only build luxury apartments in coastal cities is that they are effectively banned from building affordable housing. There is no way to get a permit to build high-density apartments in NYC, SF, etc. because property owners don't want their property values to decline.
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When you have new parcels of land for building, you don't have property owners to content with and yet, affordable housing is not built on them. Why? Profit!
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Builders have to be forced to build affordable housing here as there is no profit in it. There's only so much land and no profit in affordable housing so the city says a certain portion of new buildings have to be affordable if you want a building permit.
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>The problem is that you need to first saturate the luxury market, then saturate the AirBnB market, and then what is left is "affordable" rental market. The developers usually take a vacation before the third one with all the profits from the first two.
Actually, there's been some good research on building chains, due to data from Scandinavia showing exactly where people move from and to. If you build a luxury apartment, then the person moving into it from a high end apartment opens up that vacancy, which
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Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:4, Interesting)
Scandanavia is very different than Manhattan and the US at large in many ways when it comes to housing. You don't see many 500m2 homes on the market there. A small studio in Stockholm is about 25m2, similar to Manhattan, but a big condo or house in Stockholm tops out around 250m2. (Say 98th percentile, but just a guess.) In Manhattan, about 10% of the homes for sale are over 250m2. Given the high cost of land in Manhattan, developers generally prefer to convert small apartment blocks to about 1/10th the quantity of large, luxury units. They can get over $2,500/SF in the luxury market, but top out around $1,500/SF for smaller units.
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" Here's your economics lesson"
Soft sciences like economics aren't worth a flying fuck because the system is gamed.
Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:4, Insightful)
For what its worth, the crack-pot austrian economic gibberish that gets flung around this place would probably get an economics undergrad flunked out of first year economics.
Theres no consideration of externalities, income inequalities, historical trends, or anything like that, its just the usual a-priori "the market is good because all humans are robotic utility maximizers" junk that'd also get you flunked out of first year philosophy.
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And for what its worth the academics usually get it all wrong too because it aint a real science. See the US Federal Reserve, for recent examples. I just lob another grenade while I am at it. Nothing meaningful has been accomplished in philosophy since Job was authored either. Between the Hebrews, Greeks, and early Buddhists the human condition is really fully explored, everything after is pretty much 'gibberish.'
The fact is behavior actually is better described by those simplistic rules than most of the
Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:4, Funny)
"For what its worth, the crack-pot austrian economic gibberish that gets flung around this place would probably get an economics undergrad flunked out of first year economics."
Well, maybe not at the University of Chicago, but I get you.
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I'll bet you furiously typed that out on your capitalist cell phone, receiving annual updates from greedy capitalists.
Externalities and other things you mention are irrelevant, as business can compensate for it and continue. Meanwhile, it's another way for pols to get in the way until their spouse has another flash of investment genius, then the externality costs (externality externalities!) go away.
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I am not so sure that the price will work like that in New York as there is something wonky with the real estate market in New York.
I have off and on watched Lois Rossmans "Real estate series" and it seems that there is a huge amount of retail space available that does not get rented for years, but yet the prices are not dropping.
I do not know if there is a similar situation with housing and how huge an increase in supply would be needed to change the situation.
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Unfortunately, there are tax deductions for unrented property.
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Banks don't want renting retail for too low a cost as it depresses other rentals of concern. Otherwise sell at who knows what loss, which may be magnitudes greater than the trickle loss of sitting on it for a couple of years.
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Because their only incentive right now is that people in New York City pay extortionate rents. And the buildings they're likely to build are likely to be viable if, and only if, they can charge something close to the current market price of rents
It's like adding lanes to a major highway to reduce congestion. It actually puts more cars on the highway.
I really think that you could build several huge high-rises and not reduce rent by an appreciable amount. Some pent up demand will be relieved and some people will be willing to pay a little more for something newer. If it reduces rent it at all it would be at existing run down locations and not the new ones.
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Corporations have been focused on short term performance in order to ensure high stock prices as demanded by investors.
Corporations are routinely borrowing money to engage in Stock Buy backs.
Here's your economic lesson for today and the past several fucking decades.
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There's nothing "more secure" about long-term rentals. It's just less profitable, presumably because of rental price controls. You can always switch back to long-term rentals if the short-term rental dries up.
When you artificially suppress prices, demand tends to skyrocket while supply wanes, because you're eliminating the primary self-correction mechanism of market pricing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to things like housing (you can argue such stability is good for society in genera
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> There are really only a few solutions that I can think of
For Airbnb there's also zoning rules, insurance, commercial licenses, and other regulatory or legal measures that could be imposed or enforced if they aren't.
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Problems caused by excessive regulation are rarely solved with more regulation.
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How are regulations causing this problem? It's clearly a problem of lack of regulation, the free market deciding that it's more profitable to do short term rentals than provide stable homes for people where they need them.
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It is exactly regulation causing the problem. Two words "Rent Controls"
The simple answer is the rent is no "to damn high" the rent is not high enough. There are reasons you might want to use a property for short term rental - its actually in a vacation destination like a beach where few people *want* to live there year round. IE little work outside hospitality and nothing in terms of climate that would make anyone want to live on a North Carolina beach in January. Maybe you want to personally enjoy it part
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Strangely it's the greater level of regulation that keeps many European cities at least somewhat accessible to ordinary people on average salaries. It's a deliberate social policy to make sure that areas don't become exclusive, along with the problems that brings.
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Here we have what seems to be good regulations but there's a big problem with them not being enforced for both legal and illegal Airbnbs. Airbnb also knows about it but still isn't de-listing the illegal ones.
> Problems caused by excessive regulation are rarely solved with more regulation.
Yeah, but sometimes. Also
Problems caused by insufficient regulations are rarely solved by even less regulation.
And
Problems caused by excessive regulation are often solved by better regulations.
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Also, for a lot of us, a months salary might just only cover a weekend in our normal residence, especially in New York City, so what's your point?
Re: the invisible hand of the free market (Score:2)
Uh the cause of this is the government refusing to allow new units and building permits. Because of the government blocking peopleâ(TM)s right to build housing units, it is physically impossible to accommodate more than a certain number of people in New York. Therefore, people have to take turns being in New York. If you made the rent $1 or $10,000 only a certain number of people will be able to get housing while others feel screwed.
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Indeed. Smith's retarded belief in the free market was informed by the fact that he never had to work a day in his life nor worry about finding a home. The whole idea of the free market was invented by the wealthy for the wealthy, and fuck everyone else.
Just shut ABnB down. You want to run a business in your flat, apply for a permit.
Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:5, Insightful)
"Smith's retarded belief in the free market"
It's no so much Smith's actual belief but the fantasies and rationalizations of people who have never inquired about what Smith actually believed... including you.
Adam Smith was not an unconditional fan of the businessman. "Smith or Marx" is a fun game to play.
For example:
"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
"The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public"
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable."
"In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest.
Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."
Re:the invisible hand of the free market (Score:4, Informative)
And here is a comic that demonstrates your point:
A funny point is always better [existentialcomics.com].
That's not what these stats say (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to compare like-for-like numbers, I couldn't find number of rental units in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. But 63% of units in NYC are rentals [nyc.gov]. There are 884828 homes in Manhattan [google.com], 864790 in Queens [google.com], and 1.056 million in Brooklyn. For a total of 2.806 million units. If you assume 63% of them are rentals, that's 1.77 million rental units.
Versus 10,572 Airbnb units. Or 167 rental units for every Airbnb unit. So that would seem to indicate renting your unit to a long-term tenant is much more profitable than renting it via Airbnb. At the very least, much more popular than renting via Airbnb. The opposite of what TFA states.
The only conclusions I'd draw from these stats is that NYC needs more housing units. Based on these numbers, vacancy rate for those three boroughs is only 0.43% (7669 / 1.77 million). Average vacancy rate for the U.S. overall [ycharts.com] is 5.8%. So NYC is extremely supply-constrained.
I suppose you could argue the Airbnb units should be rental units. But even if you did that, the vacancy rate would only increase to 1.03%. Still far below the national average, so hardly likely to cause any significant drop in rents. Even if you go by the higher figure of 20397 Airbnb units, and assumed they all became apartment rentals, that would only increase the vacancy rate to 1.57%.
Or put another way, of the 5.4% delta between NYC vacancy rates vs national vacancy rates, Airbnb only accounts for 0.6% - 1.1% of it. The remaining 4.3% - 4.8% is due to other factors.
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q: So what do you do for a living?
a: Well I ride every get rich quick scheme until it starts to fizzle and jump to the next one.
q: So you profit off being a detriment to society?
a: Damn right, but I got to go complain to my senator. There seems to be poor people who are working "essential jobs" who want enough money to buy food, I need to put a stop to that.
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No surprise with NYC's rent stabilization (Score:2)
construction costs, and zoning nightmares.
When you have a regulatory environment like New York's people will do whatever they have to, to get around it.
Misealeading info, more on the next story (Score:2)
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20k isn't huge, the population of New York is 8.8 million, 3.2 million households. That's less than 1% possible households. Not a huge deal.
I spent way more than 1% of my time traveling. Assuming I'm a representative sample, there clearly are not enough AirBnBs.
So I want to say something (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, you got yours, fuck me.
What I want you to know, especially for the younger boomers and the older gen xers, is that if you don't die in the next 10 years you're going to wish you had. Just about all of us will but especially anyone who is poor enough to try relying on a handful of rental properties and selling off a house to maintain their quality of life rather than a stable society and a growing economy.
See the younger generation has absolutely nothing and with it comes nothing to lose.
In China a government official threatened somebody saying they're children and grandchildren would be punished. You know what they're response was? "We Are The Last Generation".
That was the most Stone Cold fuck you to authority I have ever heard in my entire life. And I'm older than dirt. Those are the generations you're screwing over by blocking any reform that would benefit or help them in an effort to hang on to a past you imagine. I passed you literally got from television rather than history books and it was never real.
That generation isn't going to have any kids for authorities to threaten. And they're not going to have any property to lose either. What they will have at least in America is a shitload of firearms and a shitload of anger.
Maybe old gun down the first one. Hell maybe you'll gun down the first 10. Maybe you'll die of old age before one of them has your number. But I can tell you right now the cops aren't going to protect you. The half million dollars you got selling your home to one of them and a few thousand a month you bring in from rental fees isn't going to be enough to pay for private security. And there isn't going to be any taxpayer dollars coming from anyone to cover public security.
I guess they'll be the military but God knows that never works out well. That's an occupying Force not a police force.
You can still change this though but you need to show up to vote for people who you don't really want to vote for. And you need to give the avocado toast generation a fair shake.
And you know what? I don't think you got it in you. I think we're about to let our civilization collapse. Not out of laziness or lack of manly men or anything of the sort but just out of a general mean-spirited greediness.
I would love to be proven wrong. We have a midterm election coming up in America. So feel free to prove me wrong. And remember boomers, you're in charge. So whatever happens it's on you.
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https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab... [duckduckgo.com]
Re:So I want to say something (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm 50, and well off through a lot of hard work and healthy amount of luck. Also no kids as I don't have the capacity for parenting.
1. I think your "last generation" analysis might be self-serving (as it could be if I said it); the reality is that GenX got some shitty leftovers from the Boomers early in life (much like the GenY/Millenials/Z/whatever). There are a couple fundamental differences, and helicopter parenting could be a cause or effect but it is related to some critical thinking.
2. You are grossly underestimating the impact of a talented few on society. I work with some brilliant 30-something engineers and professionals that will go further than I ever have. I don't have a large enough sample size to know if they will be financially successful in 10 or so years, but they don't look fundamentally different than me on their path.
3. The very real problem of wealth distribution is not exclusively an age-based issue. If you look at history, the robber-barons did a few things right to balance things out and improve quality of life for their employees and society at large. Our problem today is that we have these (for lack of a better term) dickwad libertarian billionaires that simply don't contribute back to society beyond trying to shape it in their own image. History again suggests what will happen here, and they are in trouble.
I am pessimistic about many things with our society, but one thing that does make me an optimist to the core is that I have found that people generally reciprocate when you treat them with respect. This is true across national and cultural boundaries, race, age, religion (mostly), and politics (where it is not co-opted by religion).
Boomers are taking it with them (Score:3)
As is typical of a boomer (Score:4, Insightful)
The younger generation is saying they can't win against you. You took everything for yourself and gave it to the people at the top because of your prejudices and because you were easily fooled into punching down. So rather than worrying about Mr M or Mr B's super yachts you worried about whether a black guy in San Francisco shoplifted some diapers during a global pandemic.
Notice how the only thing you give a rat's ass about is respect. Not people's quality of life, not whether or not people have food and shelter or a treated well but whether or not people look at you and treat you with respect. Respect your generation has not earned.
This is a common thread with boomers. You wrecked the planet and you wrecked the economy and you wrecked our civilization and you want us to act like you did good somehow and show you respect. You know you haven't done a damn thing or the respect. You know what climate change is and you know the American southwest is running out of water and you know you keep putting politicians in office who block switching over to renewable energy and solving the water crisis. You know that we're about to overturn Roe v Wade because of your political choices and that a lot of women are going to die and a lot of women are going to thrown in jail for having miscarriages and you know your generation did that and even if you didn't do it personally yourself you know somebody who did and you don't talk to them about it because you don't want to make a scene or because you want them to respect you.
In short you're not worthy of respect. And when that kid in China says we are the last generation he's saying fuck you you don't deserve respect and neither does your way of life. He's saying he's not strong enough to undo the damage you did so he's just going to end it once and for all.
And that scares the shit out of you. Because you know you're not leaving anything behind except misery and woe and the end of the human race. For the same reason that okay Boomer really bothers you we are the last generation really bothers you.
It's the ultimate expression of your failure as a generation to advance our civilization and in fact your success in dooming it.
There's still time but I seriously doubt you can do anything. Again you're more worried about whether or not people respect you then you are over whether or not people live good lives or whether or not you've made the world a better place.
And at your age you're probably going to be one of the guys who gets to find out just how little the avocado toast generation respects you when they show up with their guns. Feel free to try to do something about it but again I just don't think you have it in you. You're too preoccupied with getting respect
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It's not just greed (Score:2)
What this is, this is people letting their emotions and their pride and their desire for respect they can't earn because it's hard to earn respect run wild and rampant. They're giving in to their worst and bassist emotions on a consistent basis and allowing it to inform public policy.
So instead of doing the sensible thing and putting Bernie San
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Their houses are much larger (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1950, the median home size in the US was a little under 1,000 square feet.
In 1980, the median home size in the US was just under 1600 square feet, the mean size just over 1600.
In 1990, median was over 1800 square feet, average over 2000.
In 2010, that rose to 2300 and 2400.
By 2015, it was 2500 square feet. Over 50% larger than their parents' homes. Two and a half times the size of their grandparents homes.
Contrast western Europe, with an average of 925 square feet (86 square meters).
Gotta love those spo
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It's a garbage take (Score:4, Insightful)
Again that's what happens when houses on a place to live but a retirement savings account. Again it's the boomers building their futures on The backs of the avocado toast generation they hate so much because they were taught by Fox News they hate them. It's dipshit working Americans fighting amongst themselves to see how much money they can give to their kings and queens because they never figured out what a fucking ruling class was.
Joke's on them like I said in my first post we're going to have massive roving bands of violent young people with absolutely nothing to lose. And they are absolutely armed to the fucking teeth.
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Good luck trying to buy one of those 1000 square foot homes today. Around here (high wealth, high cost-of-living area with no rural areas left to expand into), to build one of those 2500 square foot beasts, we first tear town two or three 1000 square foot houses and consolidate the lots.
Not only is average size increasing, the total
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Stemming from this laziness and overall incompetence, you never made money. The shell start-up corpo
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Government spending keeping houses cheap? What?!?! Are you suggesting that everyone used to live in housing projects, and that they were happy with it? Public housing projects have been a complete disaster.
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One of the universal truths is to always beware of someone who says the world is going to end on their watch.
Doubly so when they tell you it will end unless you vote for their preferred political candidates (regardless of party or issues).
empty investment apartments and money laundry (Score:5, Interesting)
These condos can also be used for money laundry. I buy a condo for 2 million $, 2 years later you buy it from me for 4 million $. Bam, You just "gave" me 2 million $.
Condos that are bought as investments are easier to flip if you rent them out on AirBnb rather than have actual tenants in there.
100k hotel rooms (Score:2)
Here's some more numbers: NYC has around 100k hotel rooms, and 240 million square feet of office space.
The situation is really about addressing how space gets used. Sure, maybe those AirBNB apartments could be forced to become long-term rentals, but so could the hotels or the offices.
At the end of the day, zoning for more residential area is how you increase apartment availability and drop housing prices.
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False equivalency. The AirBnBs are residential, but were taken out of the system. Conversion of commercial spaces can occur, and probably should happen more often [mapc.org], but it's not cheap or fast. Unlike slapping up a coat of paint and sprinkling some trendy photos on the wall to convert a home into an "hotel."
Once homes become an 'investment'... (Score:3)
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...and people start looking for returns on their investment & banks & property dealers want their share of the returns, etc., you end up with housing crises. Homes are where people live, rest & relax, raise their families, etc.. Skyrocketing property prices & rents drive up the cost of living, cost of employing people, cost of running businesses, prevent investment in improving infrastructure, etc., & are one of the main causes of misery & poverty.
Houses have been both a place to live and an investment since the misty depths of time. If I own my home, it's both to me. If I'm a landlord, it's an investment to me, a place to live to my tenant. We've just separated the concerns but they're both still there like they've always been. This doesn't cause or prevent a housing crisis.
What's happened here is NYC has made it more attractive for landlords to rent via AirBnB rather than as a long term rental. People respond to incentives so that's what the landl
Length of average stay (Score:2)
You need to multiply the numbers with the length of the average stay (or the mean time between renters) to do a fair comparison. If any AirBnB is rent for one week at a time, it will appear 52 times per year as available. If tenants stay for two years, that apartment will appear once every two years, or 0.5 times per year.
Enforce the Hoteling Laws (Score:2)
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all people want is cheap, and damn the consequences
Actually, as a business traveler (albeit not in the past two years), I want quality at a good price since I usually have to absorb the travel costs into my contracts. Trust me, I've stayed in some "4 star" places that are unsafe, dirty, and obsolete.
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The problem with your analysis is that marginal availability impacts pricing. If you have 5 people wanting one apartment you can charge more. If it is 2 people because there are all the AirBnB units also now competing for long-term rentals then there is less pricing pressure.
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If airbnbs were restricted to dwellings that people own but don't use often then they might actually improve the overall housing situation by making use of wasted occupancy which is already not being used for housing to operate unlicensed hotels, which existed before airbnb (though in dramatically smaller numbers.)
Instead what happens is people actually buy multiple properties to operate them as airbnbs, it's literally that profitable. Some people have 3 or 4 of these properties.
I'm generally anti-airbnb as
Re:AirBnB is not the problem, distraction (Score:5, Informative)
Also Blackstone investors contributed to the housing shortage in a big local scandal [dutchnews.nl].
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https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/... [dutchnews.nl]
In NYC there are Bodega's open 24 hours with fresh sandwiches made to order and 24 hour alcohol, and that's not even The Nation's Capitol!
I'd kill for a simple 24/7 Denny's [dennys.com] in Amsterdam. If you're hungry at night in Amsterdam, The Capitol is closed. I'm opposed to that much regulation, especially when I'm hungry and want to go out wh
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Unrelated. I'm in a city with a similar issue to NYC (Too much airbnb , not enough rental properties, and zero affordable to people on low incomes) AND we also have ridiculous laws that shut the city down after midnight as long as your not mcdonalds.
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AirBnB and the similar companies have been heavily regulated in cities like Amsterdam because they ruin the quality of life for the locals already dealing with a terrible housing crisis and tourism beyond the city's capacity. In fact 15k people protested against the housing shortage in Amsterdam several months ago. The city regulations are very popular with the locals, especially because having an AirBnB apartment-hotel-company as a 'neighbor' really sucks.
Also Blackstone investors contributed to the housing shortage in a big local scandal [dutchnews.nl].
Housing crises don't come from AirBnB, they come from the number of people wanting to live in an area exceeding the current housing stock. The issue with historic cities is they have trouble adding new stock without destroying the historic character of the city.
But the neighbour thing does bother me. Having a succession of random strangers showing up next door is a negative externality that AirBnbs create and I don't know of a good way to fix it.
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The way to fix it is for hotels to become more attractive than AirBnBs again.
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Removing tax breaks for unoccupied buildings would be a first start. Or legalise squatting in building for which there are no tennants for more than 'x' period. I mean, the state has already, in effect, paid the rent.
Sure, a certain grace period between tennants, or doing capital improvements. But, after 'x' period, NO TAX BREAK FOR YOU!
Then, the rental price will race to the bottom natural level.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Markets are legal frameworks created by governments - not sovereign beings with agency.
A "market" is a state of there being exchange between parties with demand and parties who can supply what they need, and the infrastructure for that exchange. It doesn't even have to involve currency. Markets create themselves, governments create institutions to regulate them. (This is not unwarranted.)
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If I own the property I can do with it whatever I want, rent it, live in it, AirBnB or leave it vacant, that's the free market.
You want to run to what amounts to a hotel? Fine. Be prepared for inspections from the fire marshal and health department.
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AirBnB is not the problem, distraction
airbnb absolutely is a whole bunch of problems.
If I own the property I can do with it whatever I want, rent it, live in it, AirBnB or leave it vacant, that's the free market
That's unsustainable.
All the NIMBY folk who are stopping others from using their land to build high rise apartment buildings have caused the housing shortage.
They're certainly contributors.
The woke crowd who think you can build affordable housing, you can't
I don't know about can't, I'd say won't. Look around at various homeless "low cost" housing projects, I'm using scare quotes because the rent may well be low (or zero) but the costs per unit to build tend to be fucking insane. California cities in particular are completely bananas. Take some of these stacks of containers that are literally piling up at ports (because you literally have to use new containers fo
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AirBNB really have a bunch going for them... No one wants to live in cities where they are and then shops close and crime spikes... The ultimate town killer.
Indeed. There were no recessions and there was no crime before AirBnB.
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No one wants to live in cities where they are and then shops close and crime spikes... The ultimate town killer.
Wouldn't that be like shooting themselves in the foot? If they killed the town and the town wasn't interesting for travelers, then AirBnB would be out of business.
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They like bedbugs and also providing convenient hosting service for prostitution services, I guess?
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Re:Ban AirBNB (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively, we could petition for more housing development, and keep Airbnb.
Airbnb is not housing. It's a short term stop over for someone out of town. It's a hotel room without the moniker in the same way Uber and Lyft are cab companies.
Alternatively, the city should choose to either treat these rentals like hotel rooms and charge the appropriate permits, fees, and taxes that hotels pay, or prohibit them altogether which would help to relieve the housing shortage since in many cases, the people who own these apartments don't live there.
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It's amazing the number of Airbnb units out there even in residential neighborhoods. I really don't understand how this sudden demand grew. The house next door to me was bought by two people out of state to be an Airbnb. There's probably 30 more within a few mile radius.