The End of Airbnb In New York (wired.com) 200
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thousands of Airbnbs and short-term rentals are about to be wiped off the map in New York City. Local Law 18, which came into force Tuesday, is so strict it doesn't just limit how Airbnb operates in the city -- it almost bans it entirely for many guests and hosts. From now on, all short-term rental hosts in New York must register with the city, and only those who live in the place they're renting -- and are present when someone is staying -- can qualify. And people can only have two guests.
Gone are the days of sleek downtown apartments outfitted for bachelorette parties, cozy two- and three-bedroom apartments near museums for families, and even the option for people to rent out their apartment on weekends when they're away. While Airbnb, Vrbo, and others can continue to operate in New York, the new rules are so tight that Airbnb sees it as a "de facto ban" on its business. The rules "are a blow to its tourism economy and the thousands of New Yorkers and small businesses in the outer boroughs who rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet," says Theo Yedinsky, global policy director for Airbnb. "The city is sending a clear message to millions of potential visitors who will now have fewer accommodation options when they visit New York City: You are not welcome."
According to Inside Airbnb, there are currently more than 40,000 Airbnbs in New York -- 22,434 of those are short-term rentals. "While the number of rentals may be small compared to New York City's population of 8 million people, Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, says some desirable neighborhoods are overly burdened by short-term rentals, which can result in housing shortages and higher rents," reports Wired. "The new law, in theory, could open these homes to local residents."
The implementation of the law shows "very clearly you can cut down on short-term rentals," says Cox, who was part of the Coalition Against Illegal Hotels, a group that advocated for the registration law. "You can make these platforms accountable."
Gone are the days of sleek downtown apartments outfitted for bachelorette parties, cozy two- and three-bedroom apartments near museums for families, and even the option for people to rent out their apartment on weekends when they're away. While Airbnb, Vrbo, and others can continue to operate in New York, the new rules are so tight that Airbnb sees it as a "de facto ban" on its business. The rules "are a blow to its tourism economy and the thousands of New Yorkers and small businesses in the outer boroughs who rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet," says Theo Yedinsky, global policy director for Airbnb. "The city is sending a clear message to millions of potential visitors who will now have fewer accommodation options when they visit New York City: You are not welcome."
According to Inside Airbnb, there are currently more than 40,000 Airbnbs in New York -- 22,434 of those are short-term rentals. "While the number of rentals may be small compared to New York City's population of 8 million people, Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, says some desirable neighborhoods are overly burdened by short-term rentals, which can result in housing shortages and higher rents," reports Wired. "The new law, in theory, could open these homes to local residents."
The implementation of the law shows "very clearly you can cut down on short-term rentals," says Cox, who was part of the Coalition Against Illegal Hotels, a group that advocated for the registration law. "You can make these platforms accountable."
So basically how AirBnB started? (Score:2)
Person renting extra room
About damn time (Score:5, Informative)
The idea of airbnb is supposed to be that you rent out the spare room in your house occasionally.
These regulations shouldn't be necessary if airbnb did what it says it does. But it doesn't, so the regulations are now in place.
But if you're doing what airbnb is supposed to be doing, then nothing changes.
Same with uber. They aren't doing what they say they're doing anyway. "Ride sharing". The very idea of a "Full Time Uber Driver" should be an oxymoron. That's what you call a taxi driver and there's a bunch of regulations and licensing if you want to drive a cab.
Re: (Score:2)
AirBnB is "not a hotel" as much as uber is "not a taxi"
Politics, business, bullshit...reality is also a thing.
But instead of creating a realistic law such as 'you can't buy 20 apartment units for AirBnB' while allowing individual homeowners do use their property as they see fit...we have the stupid "do the righteous thing" of NYC. This isn't a difficult fix if people weren't bowing to either the far left or special interest.
TBH i'm surprised AirBnB didn't spend enough to win over the laws they wanted.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't create a "realistic law" to do restriction job because if the law is nuanced enough people can and will weasel their way around the terms of it. Open the door a crack and it'll get kicked wide open.
Not staking a claim on either side being "right" - I have no dog in the race. I'm just saying people are weasels.
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The idea of airbnb is supposed to be that you rent out the spare room in your house occasionally
And it's exactly what we use it for: to rent out our house while we go on vacation, 5 people max, always families with young kids, so except for the occasional crying it's not like a bachelor party. Why would that be forbidden ?!? And yes, we do pay extra taxes when it's rented out. Just do a 3 months limit per year or something like that.
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Same with uber. They aren't doing what they say they're doing anyway. "Ride sharing". The very idea of a "Full Time Uber Driver" should be an oxymoron. That's what you call a taxi driver and there's a bunch of regulations and licensing if you want to drive a cab.
Yes... you're not running a "brothel", you're just facilitating "body sharing"... Lets just call a spade a spade, non? Uber are an unlicensed and unregulated taxi company. AirBNB is an accommodation provider in the same way that Expedia and Priceline are, as a facilitator. Personally I'm of the mind that we should just make it easy for them to operate as a licensed and registered business, make the rules clear, the processes to get licenses and authorisations simple. We do this here in England, you can run
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I think NYC missed an opportunity for compromise here. They could have added, "You may rent your entire house while you are gone, provided it is your primary residence for tax purposes and you live there for 90% of the year".
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Uber is much better than taxi, airbnb. I CAN'T imagine being better than Mariott.
Or Motel 6.
It's often a lot cheaper though and sometimes in a better location depending on you destination in the town you're visiting.
The rich will get richer. (Score:3)
Hotels (corporations) are rubbing their palms together right now.
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Yep ... marginal homeowners will be forced out. Again. As usual.
Wealthy investors who can write off months...years...of losses and literally profit from it will buy up those properties and make the money that the previous homeowners could have, would have, lived their lives off of.
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Yep ... marginal homeowners will be forced out. Again. As usual.
Wealthy investors who can write off months...years...of losses and literally profit from it will buy up those properties and make the money that the previous homeowners could have, would have, lived their lives off of.
This is where they should apply a empty property tax so the people can't just park there money in tax write-off properties. Empty properties and properties that are used only on weekends/rarely cost a lot to the communities around them due to businesses closing due to the lack of customers public transport gets reduced, Doctors move to where they have enough patients. etc
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MORE taxes. MORE regulation. That'll solve it!
If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
What's Your Favorite Tech Innovation? (Score:4, Funny)
What's your favorite tech innovation?
Re: (Score:3)
Courtesy of JWZ: [jwz.org]
What's your favorite tech innovation?
To be fair, AirBNB isn't a hotel chain, they're a booking facilitator like Expedia or Priceline with a more exclusive inventory. Loads of places in the world where this is not illegal. Just not in NYC any more. Their gaff, their rules. If New Yorkers want to change the rules, they know where the ballot box is. Hell, half the stuff I see on AirBNB is also on Booking.com. No doubt a few other sites that I don't know about.
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In tiny podunk towns the activity is probably totally legal, hell the town I live in doesn't even have a noise ordinance.
But in most cities (even smaller ones) it ain't, it's just running an unlicensed hotel, and airbnb does nothing whatsoever to verify whether it's aiding illegal activity. They are supporting this illegal activity willfully, and they would not have a viable business without it so the argument about valid uses doesn't apply.
Maybe the law goes too far, but (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of these 40,000 Airbnbs were really trying to operate hotels in such a way that they could avoid paying hotel taxes. New York City makes a LOT of money on hotel taxes, and of course they aren't going to let that income disappear without a fight!
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The vast majority of these 40,000 Airbnbs were really trying to operate hotels in such a way that they could avoid paying hotel taxes. New York City makes a LOT of money on hotel taxes, and of course they aren't going to let that income disappear without a fight!
And is it practical for one guy with a flat, who wants to rent it out to properly register as a hotel, fill out all the paperwork, keep up with regulation and so on? Yeah, didn't think so.
The don’t rent it. Or get fined when you get reported.
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Apparently you think that laws should not apply to "middle-class peons" because you think it officially doesn't for the 1%. Got news for you, AirBnB is a profit mechanism for the 1%.
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90% of air-bnbs are large businesses with dozens of properties per fake "host" (note that the number of properties per business is often higher) and almost all the rest are investment properties by smaller non-resident investors.
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Citation needed. https://ipropertymanagement.co... [ipropertymanagement.com] says there are 4 million hosts for 6 million listings. The mailbox principle says two-thirds of listings are the host's first listing on the platform. It also says "Over 60% of hosts in the U.S. say they rent out their primary residence while theyâ(TM)re on vacation."
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Why is this hypothetical "one guy" entitled to do that? If he "wants to", he *needs to* "keep up with regulation". Get it? "Yeah, didn't think so."
New Orleans tried "sensible regulations" (Score:5, Insightful)
New Orleans tried several sets of restrictions to reign in the proliferation of STR's that have destroyed most neighborhoods and made housing completely unaffordable in the city. All have been shot down by the courts after non-stop lawsuits by out-of-state investors (rent-seekers).
So yesterday the City Council began the process of banning them completely too. The robber-barons could not care less about the community, only how much money they can make destroying it. After all, they don't live here. This was all entirely predictable.
https://www.nola.com/news/poli... [nola.com]
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This new law will not lower housing costs here in NOLA by any statistically significant amount my friend.
Housing costs here have more to do with the fact that we're locked in here by water on all sides, and God just ain't makin
I'm of two minds about this law (Score:4, Interesting)
On one hand, I'm no particular fan of the hotel industry, and Airbnbs (in theory) are a great way for homeowners to make some money on the side.
But on the flip side, I've seen first-hand the problems caused by the absentee investors who have come to dominate the STR market where I live. Those owners could not care less how much their party houses impact the people living around them. Why should they care? They don't even live in the city.
NYC does a lot of things very poorly, but in this case they've got it right. They are forcing Airbnb to return to its roots, where the homeowners have to actually stay in the house and live with the consequences of operating a short-term rental.
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There are lots of reasons to be against air bnb. Looking closely at their name is not one of them.
North Korea: Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Not democratic. Not the people's. Not a republic. Names are just for identification purposes. Unrelated to function.
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There are lots of reasons to be against air bnb. Looking closely at their name is not one of them.
North Korea: Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Not democratic. Not the people's. Not a republic. Names are just for identification purposes. Unrelated to function.
This.
People who get pedantic about language are the ones who miss the meaning of it.
There isn't a legal definition of "Bed and Breakfast", especially one that requires breakfast to be served to you. It's a colloquialism. People who know little about the language pick on details and minor errors, people who know a lot about the language (especially the English language) understand that usage is the ultimate arbiter.
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I like how you point to one lie to prove that the entire purpose is to lie. Of course, we already know how you think.
Who's really being targeted? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...thousands of New Yorkers...rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet..."
From what we read here, it sounds very much like such people will still be allowed to accommodate paying guests. Real estate vultures who spend millions taking dozens of apartments off the rental market to outfit them as de facto hotel suites are the ones being targeted.
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100% right. And "thousands of New Yorkers" sounds like a lot, but not when you phrase it as a percentage of the population - 2000 of 8,500,000 = 0.02%
That's not the 1%; It's a fraction of the 1%.
"Tourism" (Score:2)
the negatives of airbnb (Score:5, Interesting)
In my personal experience, many airbnbs are very skeezy. I've stayed in a dozen Silicon Valley airbnbs semi-longterm as it was cheaper than a hotel as I moved around to engineering clients in the region.
What I found was: 1) many places were rooms in a house someone had bought and converted into a multi-room 'hotel'. The owner was often Chinese and did not live there. Many places had no heat in the house. Portable fan heaters only, no fire extinguishers or alarms.
2) about 1/4 of the 'guests' were people on the run (any of: could not get an apartment due to being a psycho; were dodging creditors; were actual criminals (one Sunday I was awakened by police tapping on my window, they were after another guest); a guest at one 5 room place was an alcoholic and 3 pack a day smoker, neither airbnb nor the host would do anything about the cig stink; I moved out). Some 'guests' used the places as a mail drop for criminal activities; there were often piles of mail from banks for people who were no longer there and at several places piles of envelopes with tickets or summons or from lawyers, for what looked like whole families (same last name but many different first names - multiple envelopes). Clearly multiple 'people' had used the address for some scam on a bank.
3) 80% of 'guests' were foreign-born; American guests were frequently fringy people and some were criminals in hiding.
All in all, many airbnbs that are offered as longer term rentals (not the $400 a night ones) seem very much an edgy venue. I could say a lot more but want to keep this short.
Good. Airbnb should be banned everywhere (Score:3)
In Canada, we're in the midst of a cataclysmic housing crisis. There's a severe shortage of rental accommodation in most of our cities and Airbnb exacerbates the problem. Toronto alone has more than 20,000 Airbnb listings.
Airbnb's business model is to compete with hotels without being subject to the same rules as hotels. It's time for our cities to ban Airbnb also.
Good (Score:2)
Never Vote For More Government (Score:2)
Economics (Score:2)
So much hyperbole... (Score:2)
"are a blow to its tourism economy"
Not really. The industry shuffled a bit one direction, and it's shuffling back the other.
"The city is sending a clear message to millions of potential visitors who will now have fewer accommodation options when they visit New York City: You are not welcome."
They make it sound like NYC only started to have tourism when AirBNB hit the scene. If they closed all the hotels, put signs up saying, "No foreigners! And that means other states too!", and instituted an airport entr
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes and no. AirBnB is a problem in the big picture.
The change can, in theory, put more apartments on the market. It might even do that to some limited degree.
*However* it will also cause a lot of barely-making-it homeowners to sell (or lose) their homes. Small-time homeowners leveraging AirBnB shouldn't be penalized. Big landlords should be made to fuck off.
IMO the law should have an automatic exclusion for individual homeowners - maybe for property owners who also don't qualify for NYC's rent control l
Re: great! (Score:2, Informative)
Re: great! (Score:5, Informative)
80-90% of listings on AirBnB is by "hosts" offering more than 20 places on AirBnB. And the second and third property thing is the secon most common.
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80-90% of listings on AirBnB is by "hosts" offering more than 20 places on AirBnB. And the second and third property thing is the secon most common.
In my experience, the people who own a few AirBNBs tend to do it as a full time job, so they're usually better at sorting things out, customer service, et al.
Although I wouldn't really use AirBNB in most major tourist cities because you just get too many scammers and usually there are better options that aren't legally dubious. London is the big exception for me but I haven't stayed overnight there in years and odds on, a Travelodge is going to be just as cheap and have parking.
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Realistically the vast vast vast majority of airbnbs our properties that wer
It is a solution. (Score:2)
>> AirBnB is a problem in the big picture.
Nope. It is a solution.
It would only be a problem for politicians who F*cked up the city budget and try to rake in taxes from every possible source to compensate.
Re: great! (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you see any decline at all it will be short-term at best. The main reason housing is so expensive is because getting a mortgage is just too easy, and too many people are willing to take out 30 year loans with a mortgage payment that goes well above the 28% of gross monthly income rule of thumb.
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That's not true in large cities or tourist destinations. In those places you see large out-of-state investors or corporations buying up every property available at any price because they can command what used to be a month's rent for a weekend. Hire one property manager for a dozen houses, spend Monday and Tuesday cleaning it and do it all over again next weekend. It's ruinous for the long-term health of these places, exploiting cost-of-living imbalances that exist between say California and Biloxi since
Re:great! (Score:4, Insightful)
The more rental properties available means the prices can come down some due to rising supply.
Now will this turn a 3K 1bdrm apartment into a 1K 1brm apartment?.. Hell course not.. but it may turn it into a 2500-2800 apartment.. and while 200-500 dollars doesn't seem like a lot, that can mean all the difference in the world for some people.
The main purpose of this law is two fold.. 1: "encourage" a lot of real estate squatters to actually either use, properly rent out, or sell off property.. (a lot of wealthy people buy expensive and mid-price apartments as a way to "park" money.. which gives the illusion to the market of high demand and low inventory when most of these sit unused or are turned into AirBNB's (priced to keep the riffraff out and low volume).
2: Regulate the market that was for a long time unregulated.. (most cities did the same thing with Uber/Lyft because it essentially created a legal and visible "black market" for transportation which practically killed off the taxi business)
Never let perfect be the enemy of good (Score:3, Insightful)
In a place like New York City with how many people want to live there I think the only solution is probably to build larger apartment complexes. Also the cars have to go in a proper public transportation system needs to be built I can move larger numbers of people quicker so that you can expand the amount of distance people can live away from the major work areas.
I think that's
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to live next door to a daily bachelor party. Zoning laws exist for a reason.
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
I lived in a few AirBnBs for about a year here in the LA area before signing a lease for my current place, and none of them permitted events of any kind. The only one I've ever been in (not mine) that did was a mansion that was used for a wedding, and from what I understood the terms set strict limits on things like noise, parking (must park on the actual property) and some limits on alcohol but I don't know the specifics (all we had was wine and shots of tequila, vodka, or rum.)
I kind of doubt the owner of a property used for AirBnB wants to find it totally trashed after every rental, which is basically a certainty for bachelor parties of the variety that don't have any bouncers present.
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because the AirBnB rules say something is not allowed does not mean that it does not happen, or is ignored or unnoticed by the landlord.
After all, some landlords are only in it for Da Benjamins Baby and legal issues like misbehaving short-term renters is just the cost of raking in Da Benjamins Baby.
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because the AirBnB rules say something is not allowed does not mean that it does not happen, or is ignored or unnoticed by the landlord.
After all, some landlords are only in it for Da Benjamins Baby and legal issues like misbehaving short-term renters is just the cost of raking in Da Benjamins Baby.
The problem is the tenant, and you blame the landlord. Typical BS that doesn't solve any problems. In most, if not all, jurisdictions the landlord's hands are tied. There is nothing they can legally do. They are not the police. It needs to escalate to the point that there is a police report in order for them to go and prove to a judge that the tenant misbehaved. Then after a year or so the judge issues a warning to the tenant not to do it again. All this costs Da Benjamins Baby that are factored in to the next rent increase and a respectful tenant pays.
The sad part is that if the landlord calls the police, it is called a contract dispute since the tenant behaves when they see the police arrive.
But according to you a problem tenant requires we blame the landlord. Sad.
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Benjamins, yes. Having to repair a trashed apartment between every rental? No way.
Most landlords/hosts want nothing to do with parties and often will monitor via doorbell camera...parties don't make them more money but are WAY more hassle.
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Nobody who owns a short-term rental wants this, and there are devices sold online that monitor the space for noise level, smoking, etc.
https://get.minut.com/airbnb [minut.com]
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Well, to be fair...this is New Orleans we're talking about...
It can be party time any day/night in private, rental or ABB homes....
It's part of living here my friend...life IS a party.
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to live next door to a daily bachelor party. Zoning laws exist for a reason.
This. There's an AirBnB next door to my mother's house. It's a nightmare. Noise at all hours & rubbish strewn around in the back alley & in the street. Most AirBnB guests couldn't give a shit about the neighbours. Despite it being a really friendly, sociable, lively, & very tolerant community, everyone in the neighbourhood hates that AirBnB. It's only a matter of time before they get organised & start political campaigns to get the local laws changed.
AirBnB are exploiting loopholes in the law for profit without any regard for the people who have to live in those areas. There's also a lot of AirBnB scammers that rip people off because they know there's little or no chance of getting caught. We have licensed, regulated hotels, hostels, party venues, etc., in specific areas for a reason. Let's not allow these corporations to wreck our neighbourhoods.
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Yea verily, the only solution for littering and noise violations and public nuisance and fraud and other violations of laws and legal rights is to ban AirBnBs! /s
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I can't speak for where ever you live, but in NYC if you put in a noise/trash/etc. complaint the cops actually come and will shut down parties or ticket buildings for trash.
There are certainly bad AirBnB hosts and guests...but if the recourse people have is whining on /. instead of things like....
- taking to the guests
- talking to the homeowner
- filing complaints with the city
Oh right...i forgot it's 2023 and complaining to everyone except the people who can actually fix the problem is the norm.
If an AirBnB
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Informative)
Zoning exists, but not for this reason.
Zoning exists for fire and emergency reasons FIRST. For example every fire hall in your city covers a set distance, and a maximum of 4 stories (the maximum height of a ladder truck), once you get over 4 stories, the building must be 100% concrete and have sprinkler systems. Commercial units must have additional protections to run kitchens/restaurants, as an example.
This is why your typical Walmart occupies as much land as it does, it literately is a "let it burn" scenario. There is no way to put out a fire in a Walmart if it were 4 stories, nor could everyone escape if it has more than 2 floors. This is why most commercial properties occupy no more than two floors, and everything above that is residential or "office" type space.
What has happened is that AirBnB turned residentially zoned places into illegal commercial (hotel) spaces. All cities should do exactly what NYC has done and limit BnB type services to "owner-occupied" units. Which means no AirBnB's in anything but 2-story homes that were originally designed with what was probably an illegal basement suite in the first place.
The ideal situation is that all these short term rentals disappear and hotels go back to serving the role they were originally designed to serve. Return all those units back to housing spaces.
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I'm sure there's an interesting point in here somewhere, but it's drowned out by a symphony of stupid assertions. Zoning exists for fire and emergency reasons FIRST? LOL
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Well number 2 needs enforcement to come out and shut them down.
This isn't an AirBnB problem. It isn't a zoning problem. It's an enforcement problem and honestly trivial to solve if anyone cared enough to do so.
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Nobody wants a bachelor party in their backyard every night. Or a brothel. Or a meth lab.
Your point?
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Yep. Nobody wants a bachelor party in their backyard every night. Or a brothel. Or a meth lab.
Your point?
I didn't know operating meth labs was legal, and only this new law can stop them. Bully for NYC, heroically fighting meth labs! Yes, banning AirBnB is the obvious, simplest, most effective and right way to do that!
Slash s in case you need it spelled out.
Re: (Score:2)
Says you! I want my meth lab and brothel. Do you have any idea how profitable it is having a meth lab and brothel working as a single business in my backyard. My neighbors stopped caring after they got the first one for free.
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... and zoning laws prevent brothels or meth labs? At least a bachelor party is legal, even if the noise from it often isn't.
Zoning laws have some merit, but are mostly NIMBY nonsense these days.
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STR's are a valid NIMBY issue though. This is destroying average people's literal back yards and neighborhoods. Find another hustle instead of cheap rent-seeking.
Re:Not realistic (Score:5, Informative)
Zoning laws exist for a reason.
Mostly NIMBY'ism.
Is it though? I know people who live in a multi family house where one of the other residents operates an AirBnb. Apart from the regular partying and just general noise generated late in the evening and night by vacationers who don't have to go to work the next morning, there's all kinds of other irritations. A major one is getting rung out of bed by your own doorbell at all hours of the day and night by your neighbours' AirBnb guests even after putting a sign over your doorbell that reads "NOT! The AirBnb". There's the problem of AirBnb guests constantly parking in the the permanent residents' clearly marked personal parking spots which is aggravated by the presence of several other AirBnb operators in the same street whose guests also park wherever they please. The AirBnb guests tend to use whatever washer and dryer they feel like using in the communal wash room which is also pretty annoying when you need to use your washer and find that somebody else is using it. My personal favourite though is the occasional introduction of interesting wildlife like cockroaches and bedbugs that AirBnb guests bring with them in their luggage from home or some other AIrBnb stay, ... this list goes on, and on. Hotels, guest-houses, bed-n-breakfasts are all required by law to deal with inconveniences like this at their own expense. A local hotel kept clogging up a cul-de-sac with buses every morning trapping people who were going to work in the cul-de-sac for long periods of time. The Hotel operator got sued. The court found in favour of the homeowners, forced the hotel to construct special bus parking for the damn buses and introduced the Hotel operator to the concept of tightly scheduling bus arrivals and departures to avoid more traffic jams or face further consequences. Contrast this with AirBnb operators who in many places have been able to just offload all of the inconvenience resulting from their AirBnb business on their neighbours and then tell their neighbours to go f*** themselves when they complain because hitherto AirBnb operators have often operated in a legal loophole that courts don't quite know what to do with. If NYC wants to make AirBnb operators shoulder the same kind of responsibilities that all other small businesses have to shoulder then I'm not crying any rivers over it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Not realistic (Score:2)
if the rental laws weren't so utterly hostile to landlords in NY (especially NYC) then there would be less impetus to leverage short term rentals...
That must be why AirBnB is only really popular in places with restrictive rental laws like NYC.
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As someone who has never lived in NYC, I can't imagine a reason why someone would ever want to live there or tour there. The most crowded hell-hole on the planet.
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As someone who has never lived in NYC, I can't imagine a reason why someone would ever want to live there or tour there. The most crowded hell-hole on the planet.
If only more AirBNB users felt this way!
Re:Not realistic (Score:4, Funny)
"Nobody ever goes there anymore. It’s too crowded." -- Yogi Berra
Re: good (Score:2)
Re: good (Score:4, Insightful)
How about the neighbors who actually live there? They should be the ones making the local laws. You know, the locals? People who show up for three days to shit up the place and then quickly leave town shouldn't have any say.
Re: 12 step AB&B Anonymous program (Score:2)
Great. Should it be called ABBA, then? =)
Re: (Score:2)
Right, this was my immediate take. AirBnB contributes to the crisis, it is not a solution to it.
Re: good (Score:4, Interesting)
AirBNB's whole business model is helping people to dodge laws at the expense of neighborhoods, renters, and would-be home owners. They assist people with running unlicensed hotels and drive up housing prices. People are literally buying multiple homes on credit and turning them into these neighborhood hotels, and it's unsustainable.
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Exactly, where do short term rentals come from? AirBnB.
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Nazis weren't the problem, the holocaust was?
Re: AirBnB is literally just "flophouse 2.0". (Score:2)
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Your brilliant deduction is that I don't have an extensive background...
The subject is New York City. You used the word motel rather than hotel. Perhaps it was just a typographic mistake. But more likely, you don't know shit.
I remember being a young adult who didn't know the difference between a hotel and motel. I also talked a big, embarrassing game...
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Exercise those razor-sharp powers of deduction and try not to read implications that aren't there.
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I'm an old adult and really don't know the difference.
Can you make a quick explanation of the difference between the two?
Thank you in advance!
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It's about zoning laws. If you want to operate a hotel then fine, get the property zoned as commercial and then be regulated as a hotel.
Zoning is overdone and obsolete. (Score:3)
Zoning is overdone, and obsolete in the USA.
The intent of zoning is for people to not die due to industrial fumes. That's it.
It has been abused.
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The intent of zoning is for people to not die due to industrial fumes. That's it.
You're an idiot. There are numerous reasons for zoning.
In my city, county, and state, we have direct democracy. We do elect representatives, but if we don't like what they're doing, we put it on the ballot and vote on it directly. And so I quite a bit about local zoning laws, just from having voted on so many details over the years. And I can assure you, there are lots of reasons for zoning laws. And zoning laws are also popular.
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Houston doesn't really look all that bad, though.
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Houston does have regulation they just don't call it "zoning"
https://therealdeal.com/texas/... [therealdeal.com]
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Especially when you're not qualified to do the "looking".
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Fine, lets get the cops out of the way and have some community justice then.
What do you think will happen then?
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Does your right for a cheaper vacation outweigh the rights of those living in those neighborhoods full-time to not have to deal with the negative consequences of living next to unregulated STR's?
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IMHO, the families being priced out are those attempting to live here.
Those visiting can still do so if you actually want to visit NYC. If you want an NYC experience, don't fucking drive and accept that accommodations are smaller and more expensive than elsewhere, cause everyone living here is more impacted by that than you on your weekend.
If you want to drive to get to NYC, then consider staying outside the city and take public transit in (trains are fantastic for that, btw). If you're hoping to stay in a
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"If NYC chooses to price families out of their market with regulations, that's their choice."
Just like it's your choice to misrepresent what the city is doing because you view it as taking away your right to a cheaper vacation. As said before, the city is better off without you, not that you would actually make such a decision. It's all about you, not what the city is trying to accomplish.
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But you don't have to attract YOUR type of visitors. Furthermore, good regulation WILL attract visitors, the kind that you actually want.
All you care about is the dollar in your pocket. You aren't fit to comment on how to run a city.
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NYC is a world-class major city that will have no trouble attracting tourists. This won't even make a blip on tourist revenue.
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I certainly hope you are right, but I have my doubts. Time will tell. I am perhaps still too shocked by what has happened to San Francisco, once a tourist mecca.
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"I heard that the place is quite distressed,so maybe it's for the best not to even think about visiting."
I've heard that the place is better off without your business.
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I'd say it's to exploit people's greed to skim profits while having no accountability. You know, just like Uber, from the exploitive thinking that brought us Uber.