I've actually rented a room in the place that comment is complaining about. Small world. I found it on craigslist before AirBnB even existed, so the building wasn't built just for the site. It may have been built for short-term rentals in general, but I doubt it. Toshi was working on the mezzanine level of the apartment while we were there, and there's a shower with a window out to the living room, which isn't particularly conducive to rentals...
It was a way better experience than using a hotel. He actually double booked the room for a couple of the days, so he gave us a different apartment in Manhattan for those days. We ended up getting to experience more neighborhoods on a deeper level than we would have otherwise. You could always split a trip between two normal hotels, but they usually aren't in actual neighborhoods.
Making this illegal is dumb, and it reeks of wholesale purchasing of legislation.
> It was a way better experience than using a hotel. He actually double booked the room for a couple of the days, so he gave us a different apartment in Manhattan for those days.
How good would the experience be if he didn't have that second apartment?
It would've sucked. The double booking was an accident as far as I could tell, and that's not unheard of at normal hotels. I wasn't counting the chance of getting to stay in multiple places as a benefit of short-term rentals. It's negligible.
I've seriously underestimated the popularity of airbnb if people are purpose building structures (undercover no less) for the sole purpose of marketing them as a place to crash on airbnb.
Also amazed that neighborhood groups have "Illegal Hotels Committee"s
Yeah, our neighbor pretty blatantly runs an illegal hotel out of her house in Brooklyn. Usually it's fine but she often has young, European guests who like to party in her backyard (about 10 feet from our bedroom window) until 6am. Luckily this is reserved for weekend evenings (most days) so we don't complain; though if it got out of hand, it might be nice to have some alternative to (almost never enforced) noise ordinances.
That said, I'd rather live with this than cut off opportunities/efficiencies created by airbnb!
To solve the noise issue, lower the burden of proof for noise citations for people who are renting out their apartments as hotel rooms. When landlords have a stake in keeping the noise down, it seems like it would be easier to keep in check.
The illegal hotel problem (esp on the west side of NY) is indeed actually big enough to warrant a committee on the community board-- the west side is home to a lot of SRO's and seedy 'hotels' that cater to folks coming into NYC via the Port Authority bus terminal.
Well, try living with me. I live in Ashbury Heights in SF. Our next door neighbor runs a possibly illegal short stay hotel. It sucks ass -- this is a quiet residential neighborhood and he rents to either redneck trash that think it's appropriate to open their car windows, blast country music as loud as their stereos will go, and drink cheap beer on the sidewalk at 2 in the morning or to eurotrash who at least have their loud parties in the house, but tend to party much later. I've had to repeatedly call the police, and finally settled the problem, for the most part, by setting my alarm for 4 AM and ringing the doorbell of the owners / using an air horn to wake the owners up. I made him understand that when I don't sleep, his family doesn't sleep, and he finally cracked down on it.
I still have his drunk assholes peeing on our garden once a month.
This is already illegal, the problems already solved. Distrust of corporate/labour/professional groups that want regulate something out of "safety concerns" etc. is far too low.
It was a way better experience than using a hotel. He actually double booked the room for a couple of the days, so he gave us a different apartment in Manhattan for those days. We ended up getting to experience more neighborhoods on a deeper level than we would have otherwise. You could always split a trip between two normal hotels, but they usually aren't in actual neighborhoods.
Making this illegal is dumb, and it reeks of wholesale purchasing of legislation.