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.
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.
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.
It's amazing how lazy the supply siders are on this argument. Of course there's no good data-- real estate interests fight to prevent that data from even being collected. You only have to drive around major cities at dusk and see how many units have no lights on for weeks on end to recognize the magnitude of the problem. There may be data from Vancouver BC and other places that have passed vacancy taxes to address the issue. Further, the amount of construction resources that go into building luxury condos and other useless units are resources that CANNOT be used to build good housing. There is a limited supply of labor and supplies for that.
Adding more houses to the market certainly will decrease pricing pressure. Nobody said banning Airbnb was suddenly going to make housing affordable but decrease prices.
And my question remains, which is more valuable to society, short term rentals or homes?
It's not a zero-sum game. You can have both, but you need to build enough to have it. Regulating the use of a thing is a mark of market failure. How would you feel if the government told you that you could only use a pencil for writing because that has more social value than its use in making a model log cabin?
You're also failing to process my point: that banning short-term rentals is an ineffective lever, not that it won't have an epsilon of impact. Yes, you will increase supply by a tiny amount relative to the shortage. It will have near-zero pricing impact because the magnitude pales against the problem.