[cortesoft]

There are externalities, though, to running a hotel, which is why we have taxes and rules to mitigate those things. These people are trying to bypass these mitigations, and push the externalities back on the populace. That is not ok.

[karzeem]

One distinction I should have drawn is between running an Airbnb with a landlord's permission (or as a landlord yourself) versus doing it in violation of other agreements you have (like with your landlord or co-op board or whatever). If you're violating contracts, then yeah, you shouldn't be doing that and other people in the building have a right to be upset.

But if you own the building and are running it as an Airbnb hotel, I don't know that it's a self-evident fact that you're putting significant negative externalities onto your neighboring buildings. I can imagine negative externalities, but I can also imagine plenty of positive ones. These are exactly the kind of calculations that regulators are empirically horrible at making, even when they have the best intentions (and often they don't have even that going for them).

The ban on short-term rentals is a ban on a use of property which is provably very valuable to the people on both sides of those transactions. Banning that use destroys value for both those sides. The objection is that short-term rentals divert housing stock away from long-term renters, but that's not a problem with short-term rentals (which are, as we can see from the fact that they're so popular, an even more in-demand use of the property than long-term rentals), it's a problem with the low supply of housing. Which is a problem caused by the very regulators who are riding in to "save" renters from Airbnb.

[coredog64]

Taxes on hotel stays are popular with politicians because the people who pay the tax aren’t typically residents. It’s more likely that these taxes were an easy sell rather than something that offsets a negative externality of having a hotel nearby.