[mrgordon]

The marginal supply of housing argument is often a bit ridiculous. Many cities will give their best real estate to hotels and create entire neighborhoods where locals can basically not find housing. Meanwhile some Airbnbs interspersed through the city is the thing driving up housing cost. Just start converting hotels into apartments and you've solved the problem.

You say "tourists are not paying taxes to the city" which is certainly wrong for San Francisco and for most other cities I've travelled to as well. In San Francisco, there is a 14% occupancy tax and it is taken by Airbnb automatically during booking as they do in hundreds of cities. Compare this to Craigslist where I used to rent and nobody ever mentioned paying tax once.

Finally, many of these cities literally have tourism as their number one industry. Its a bit dangerous to start saying that the people who fund your city are second class citizens since they only pay occupancy taxes and not income taxes. In fact many of the areas against Airbnb like Miami Beach have bent over so far backwards for tourists that all they care about are the hotels now.

[rdlecler1]

Taxes in SF are about $3,300 per capita ($2.7b). Hotel taxes bring in $300m revenue, basically what it costs the city for it’s homeless budget. Also tourists are not voters they have no long term interest in the city, cities should be prioritizing around the residents not tourists.

[jimrandomh]

No, converting hotels into apartments doesn't solve the problem. The total amount of spaced used by Airbnb and hotels combined is too small compared to the need for housing; the only thing that solves the problem is removing the height limits, and letting people put up taller buildings.