Its easy to be cynical. It’s harder to recognize that any significant societal change is going to come with some identifiable downside and that those downsides aren’t automatically a reason to not make the change.
What kind of benefit does society get from Airbnb that's so necessary to disrupt the lives of people living in a city and raising rents on folks that can't afford it?
"AirBnb increasing rents" is theory popularized by hotel industry and never been confirmed with hard data. AirBnb allows anyone to profit from demand for lodging, as opposed to few large hotel chains taking all profit. For many AirBnb hosts it's their livelihood. E.g. do you see benefit in anyone being able to start a restaurant or do you think only large restaurant chains should be able to do it? Also AirBnb increases tourist traffic benefiting other businesses.
Technology has always outrun regulation. It’s not any different in these cases. Regulators will catch up as they always have. This, truly, is how progress has been made since the dawn of time.
You’re taking the same position people took against the printing press, automobiles, and computers when they were all in their infancy.
Restaurants in people’s homes were incredibly common until health regulators showed up.
Yes I did sort of lump those together. But it's not 100% enforcement either. Lots of place didn't and don't have rules against short term rentals - but we're seeing more and more pop up in response to Abnb
That is such a slippery slope. How do you distinguish between painful societal change that will actually produce long term benefits versus painful societal change that is virtue signaling as good but really is lining the pockets of, ironically, Chinese and Saudi Arabian investors.
A) that’s not what a slippery slope means B) carefully and thoughtfully. Airbnb has also enabled a whole slew of new small business owners. Uber has demonstrably cut down on the number of traffic deaths attributable to drinking and driving. Etc etc. you have to evaluate the whole.