[Frondo]

People are talking a lot about safety regulations, as in, "well, if you're willing to take the risk of sleeping in someone's house, you should be able to," but what gets me is that safety's just one of the things hotel regulations ensure.

Another is access for the disabled. I've stayed in a few AirBNBs that would absolutely have been off-limits to someone in a wheelchair, but the number of times I've stayed in a hotel that wasn't disability-accessible? Zero.

Yeah, choice is great when you're talking about saving some bucks and taking on the risk of sleeping in an essentially-unlicensed hotel, but what about the people for whom the regulations guarantee them access to commerce or travel at all?

Like others have said, regulations develop out of a reaction to a lousy status quo. I think it'd be a shitty world to live in where people with disabilities were being shut out again, to the extent they used to be.

(Am I saying that, if you're going to let your room commercially, you should make it ADA-compliant? Maybe so. It's at least worth thinking about, instead of saying, by default, screw those folks in wheelchairs.)

[eric_h]

ADA compliance is a fair point, but at the same time, I've lived in completely legal to rent apartments in NYC that were absolutely not wheelchair accessible.

All new buildings in NYC must have elevators/general wheel chair accessibility, but the old buildings are still there, and still being used.

Further, there are numerous AirBnB rentals that existed as licensed rental properties long before AirBnB came around that are most certainly not wheelchair accessible.

I think it would at least be fair for AirBnB to require listings that are/are not wheelchair accessible to say so on their listings. Beyond that I don't think it's fair to require owners of those properties to invest a large sum of money to make it accessible.

[Frondo]

Oh, absolutely, I don't think the answer is black and white; neither "any exchange of housing for money must be fully ADA-compliant"-- nor "raising the question of ADA compliance is a burdensome regulation that should be ignored".

For me, the question that's worth asking is, how do we ensure, as new ways of doing old things develop, that the people who've been shut out in the past (i.e. the people that the ADA protects) aren't just getting shut out again?

People in wheelchairs, that's a thing. The ADA is the way that, up til now, we've set up to enforce that businesses must accommodate them. Stuff like AirBNB and Uber is bringing an absolute ton of new individuals, essentially doing business, who've simply never had to think about making business accessible to people with disabilities.

Maybe there's a new regulatory framework that needs to develop? Maybe there should be a burden on the companies like AirBNB and Uber to ensure that, wherever they operate, some percentage of their service offering is wheelchair-accessible? (Even if they're buying property or hiring drivers directly to satisfy that requirement?) I don't know, just brainstorming at this point, I guess.

It would cost those businesses more, of course, but I ask myself which world I'd rather live in--one in which my two wheelchair-bound friends could actually use AirBNB wherever they went, or one in which I said "hey, sucks you're locked out of that experience, but free market, yolo"?

[eric_h]

I'm really not sure how best to handle it. Uber has definitely gotten some grief for their total inability to be accessible to people in wheelchairs in NYC, when there are yellow cabs that are, but that criticism has largely fallen by the wayside.

That cabin I rented with some friends in bumblefuck an hour outside of Boulder, CO - should they be required to install an elevator when the car we drove could just barely even get us there (even in the summer time)?

100% accessibility seems impossible (barring significant improvements in wheelchairs, which are definitely coming), but where exactly is the line?

I don't really know the answer. I think in general if you're making something new - you should make it as accessible as is reasonably feasible, but how much should we require to be "backported"?