Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zbrozek 1262 days ago
That last point - that housing is too expensive - is not something that airbnb causes or can fix. That's a supply side problem and the solution is housing construction. It may marginally exacerbate the symptom by providing liquidity.
1 comments
jerjerjer 1262 days ago
It removes liquidity from housing market, by repurposing flats/houses into hotels.
link
zbrozek 1262 days ago
It's creating liquidity, just not the kind you value. It's liquidity of short term housing rather than long term housing.
link
miguelazo 1261 days ago
Liquidity for short term housing is valuable to who? Do you think most people here or otherwise care about speculators? We don't.
link
tekknik 1262 days ago
Ok, then more accurately it’s moving liquidity. The next question is which is more valuable to society?
link
zbrozek 1261 days ago
The United States is short O(10M) housing units[0], primarily due to anti-construction policies. Airbnb has O(100k) listings[1] in the US. Banning short-term rentals is a 1% solution. That's a policy distraction, not a useful lever to pull.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing...

[1] https://www.stratosjets.com/blog/airbnb-statistics/

link
miguelazo 1261 days ago
There are plenty of empty luxury condos in every major city. They mostly serve as bank accounts for foreign investors. There's plenty of construction, just the wrong type.
link
zbrozek 1260 days ago
Maybe so, but can you show any data that it's a significant or meaningful problem and not a visible scapegoat? The data I found (above) makes clear that deleting the short-term rental market would not even dent the housing shortage problem in the United States.

I could believe (and maybe someone in this thread has data!) that in some extremely over-constrained markets that units are disproportionately used for short-term rentals. But I haven't seen any numbers. And in those cases, you still should be building homes to solve the root cause problem.

Americans persistently seem to want to find any reason at all to absolve themselves of responsibility for the housing crisis. It's investors! It's short-term rentals! It's corporate landlords! But it's never the locals who oppose construction.

link