[cameronfraser]

I agree, AirBnB is an unsustainable business and I would also like to see it regulated out of existence. It is extremely classist. Only something that middle class or higher can use while reducing housing availability which primarily impacts lower classes.

[akirakurusu]

How is it something only classists can use? I use Airbnb _because_ it is cheap, usually significantly cheaper than hotels when visiting cities. I use it to save money because I am cost conscious. A lot of lower-income friends also use Airbnb because of this very reason. It has been a lifesaver for us.

[typon]

You're a tourist going to another city on vacation or other reasons. You're middle class and thus part of the problem for the lower class people of that city.

[bane]

I'm sorry, this is a fantastically ignorant and entitled statement. Poor people often need to travel.

I say this as somebody who grew up firmly poor and was even homeless with my entire family for a time.

[typon]

We are talking about the majority of the reason why people use Airbnb. It's used as a replacement for hotels for people on vacation.

Of course having a cheap place to stay for people who can't afford hotels when they're traveling is a necessity. That role was traditionally filled by hostels and I'm not sure if Airbnb is a good replacement for that when you look at all the downsides.

[bane]

When my family was homeless, we would have killed to have had the security of an AirBnB available back then. Instead we stayed in a number of different places, many of which were downright dangerous.

After we clawed our way out of poverty, my parents were unable to afford to take our family anywhere for over a decade. The first family vacation we ever took we slept in the car and brought all of our own food. Poor people need to take a break also and this terrible vacation was blessed luxury from multiple jobs, daily danger and sickness, and grinding poverty.

My extended family is also spread all over thousands of miles as jobs were to be had. A simple visit to meet grandparents, or to meet cousins or other family is not a middle class problem. Poor people have families and loved ones as well.

I'm going to say this as respectfully as I can -- you don't know what it means to be poor with unstable housing, and you should think more about speaking for poor people, what you perceive to be their needs, and should stop scolding other people for not being poor.

[typon]

Thanks for assuming my background. Rest assured I grew up in poverty that few have experienced, even in the third world country where I grew up.

Moreover, i don't really care about your lived experience and I don't think you should care about mine either - I think in these types of discussions its better to take a statistical approach and see the effect of Airbnb at a societal scale - its the only way to make just decisions that aren't short sighted.

[kstenerud]

Because it removes the place from the rental market. We're not talking about people holidaying; this is about having access to a roof over your head in your daily life.

[heavenlyblue]

Here’s an alternative point of view: If you’re cosy-conscious; then don’t travel. Many places would be much better without a constant onslaught of poor tourists.

[gumby]

It’s a luxury only for the wealthy? My parents went on walkabout through the 60s and 70s dragging their kids behind them (starting about age 3, and not even two for my sister) and it was great. All over South and Southeast Asia and Western Europe. We certainly saw the countries in ways that would have been invisible had we been staying in luxury hotels, or spent the whole of the first 15 years of my life in Australia.

[heavenlyblue]

Nobody asks you to pay for a _luxury_ hotel, by the way.

Also today for me it seems that renting a cheap AirBnb is akin to making photos of yourself next to sedated tigers/elephants/you name it - it does the same to erode the local culture.

[ravenstine]

I don't get that argument. Going by your logic, housing itself is classist because people who aren't at least in the middle class can't afford houses much of the time. And maybe it is, but then what? Are we supposed to abolish classism because some people are less fortunate?

[skor]

I can give you an example. A cheap-to-rent apartment in a central part of an old popular city in Europe, is now a pricy Airbnb.

This means that students, young families, people with lower income have to move out of a suburb they we born, studied, have friends, etc. And now have to find a place elsewhere on the outskirts, where tourists don't want to go.

This is apart from arriving at your buildings front door and having some stranger stand behind you while you turn the key.. a very irritating situation.

[cactus2093]

Airbnb makes the problem 10-20% worse, but almost no cities are building net positive housing compared to their growth. People getting priced out will continue to happen with or without Airbnb, until cities take housing seriously and build more.

[legitster]

I think the idea that that apartment was cheap-to-rent is likely a stretch. It was likely a middling apartment that got upclassed. Low income housing in the bad part of town doesn't really show up on Airbnb.

[kstenerud]

That's right. Only the middle class can afford houses, so the lower classes live in apartments. And what happens when the middle class takes the apartments as well? Should the less fortunate build shanty towns to live in?

This isn't about people monopolizing some conveniences; access to housing is a human right (article 25), which is why governments regulate it.

[emptysongglass]

Leasing property should be out of the hands of regular regular folks because regular folks don't know how to handle it ethically. I define regular folks as pretty much anyone not heavily regulated for ethical performance.

The problem with leasing property is that once you've bought the property to lease, you the landlord (good god the feudal nature of the word itself should be setting off alarm bells) are now in possession of a basic need of humans (shelter) that you can dole out as you please. This property is also fairly easy to manage without it going down in flames so the next step is maximizing your own comfort at the top of your middle-class existence at the cost of some poor other unfortunate. This poor other unfortunate must clamber up to the top of the shit-pile racing against time as you bleed them dry so they too can afford a property to squeeze out the next unfortunate.

It's a pyramid scheme of the worst kind. But its practice is widespread and common enough that we don't bat an eye. And you don't have to look far to see abuses everywhere veiled in legal frameworks. My wife, for example, was recently thrown out of a Scandinavian country because we didn't have a strong enough case for residency. Her landlords were a man and a wife both very well-off living downstairs. We thought it was an amicable living arrangement until, on moving out, they politely informed her she'd be paying two months of rent after her departure to "give them enough time to find a replacement". This was in a city swarming with desperate people willing to kill their pet if it meant they could be move in the same day. My own experiences with landlords in the US have been of the same awful caliber.

We, as human beings, have allowed these abuses because there are no sufficient checks and balances to our own greed. It's all Self-first and damn the others. I feel a kind of hollowness eating me out from the inside every day I get a little older wondering where the Hell we all went wrong.

[wolco]

Can you name and shame the country?

[emptysongglass]

Norway, specifically the city of Høvik, which is practically a part of Oslo being as close as it is to the Oslo city center.

[officemonkey]

It depends on what you think the best use of housing is. Is housing meant to "make money for the owner" or "provide housing for people?"

There, I've just taken class out of the equation. Your answer?

[skulpter]

Are clothes meant to “make money for manufacturers” or “provide warmth for people”

Is food meant to “make money for producers” or “provide nutrition for people”

None of these things are mutually exclusive. Otherwise, where do you draw the line?

[officemonkey]

The problem is "Housing" is not simply a consumable like food or (mostly) clothes.

The owner can consume the housing or rent it. But if it's not used to house people, then is it really housing? Or just real estate?

[matz1]

Best use of housing is whatever the owner think its best for. There is no single answer.

[kstenerud]

The best use of housing is what the government defines, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (specifically, article 25) for all United Nations members.

[matz1]

Disagree, government interest is not be universal.

[peteradio]

> abolish classism

Do you think that is the fairest interpretation of your opponents argument?

[bane]

> Only something that middle class or higher can use

I think it's more nuanced than that. I've stayed in AirBnBs that were clearly being run as a major source of income by people who otherwise didn't have many options for income (remote areas, Native reservations, etc.). I remember staying in a spare structure in the Navajo nation a few years back, it was run by an elderly couple who were looking after their 3 granddaughters and literally had no other way to make income to support themselves or the girls. They said AirBnB and a prepaid cell phone had literally turned around their entire economic situation.

Separately, it has enabled many of my friends who are on the lower end of the economic spectrum to afford to go places with their family as AirBnBs are usually cheaper than hotels and generally larger and often include kitchens (further saving costs eating out while traveling). One of my friends in particular (in his 40s) took his first out-of-state family vacation ever due to this. Before this they never ventured further than a few hours drive from where they lived because they simply couldn't afford it.

I also entirely agree that they need to be better regulated, and that they can have a deleterious effect on local housing prices. Japan seems to have taken some serious steps towards finding a good balance of regulation and availability for these things. On a trip to Japan we stayed in hotels and AirBnBs and in every case the BnBs were cheaper, larger, and generally better than the hotels. However, they're only allowed to use them as short-term rentals for 180 days per year, must be licensed and have other restrictions on when they can be used. [1]

I don't know if Japan's approach is the right one, but the number of AirBnBs available in Japan make me think that it hasn't destroyed the legitimate marketplace for this type of side income (where AirBnB is at its best) while also making it much harder for people to soak up the local rental market as speculators with "accommodations" being used to reduce risk in their investment portfolio.

1 - https://www.asiaone.com/asia/airbnb-says-forced-cancel-booki...

[xwdv]

Housing availability for lower class individuals is not impacted because low class housing generally isn’t rented out on AirBnB.

[yokaze]

Sure it is, the market pressure redefines, what is low-class housing. Local middle-class unable to compete with international tourists splurging for a couple of days have to go for formerly low-class housing.

[ericzawo]

You haven't done much backpacking have you.

[wyager]

If you think it needs to be "regulated out of existence", it sounds like you think it actually is sustainable; you just don't like it.

> It is extremely classist. Only something that middle class or higher can use

So you think any business which isn't affordable to everyone should be shut down?

[vladvasiliu]

I think the part of the sentence missing in your quote ("while reducing housing availability which primarily impacts lower classes") explains his stance.

Usually businesses catering to the upper classes don't usually do so at the detriment of "the poor". For example Ferrari selling 100k+ cars doesn't prevent me from buying a cheap car. Homeowners renting to "rich people" prevents a poor person from renting the same apartment.

This could of course happen with regular rentals, but the difference is that nobody would pay above market rates for a long-term rental, which is what basically happens with Airbnb.

[wyager]

Why do you say it's "above market" when there's a market for it?

[vladvasiliu]

I mean "above the rates of the long-term rental market".

I think the argument is that Airbnb and similar take those apartments from the long-term rental market and put them on the (very) short-term rental market, aka the hotels'.

The problem put forward by those arguing against Airbnb is that this is a zero-sum game. If you have tourists who are able and willing to pay more for a flat (aka "middle or higher class"), this reduces housing availability for "the lower classes".

You could, of course, argue that this would be true even without Airbnb if enough "higher class" people wanted to live in a given city all of a sudden. I suppose that's why people also tend to be against gentrification.

[wyager]

> this reduces housing availability for "the lower classes".

Only in the areas that are popular tourist destinations. I guess that's something that NIMBYs seem to care about that I don't identify with at all. Why does it matter if poor people can afford to live in the hottest tourist areas? As we can very clearly tell from the price signals, being there doesn't benefit them nearly as much as it benefits the tourists.

As you say, the same thing applies to the long-term housing market. The price signals are telling us that there's a large social benefit to having higher-productivity workers living in urban zones, and there's an opportunity cost associated with displacing (counterfactual) high-productivity workers with low-productivity workers.

[empath75]

If I build a factory that dumps toxic sludge into the water supply, that’s not sustainable and yet it might be quite profitable in the absence of regulation.

[wyager]

Airbnb doesn't have massive uninternalized externalities. The preconditions of the Coase theorem are pretty close to being met when it comes to house rental.