They did kill a whole bunch of things... like the ability to rent at a reasonable rate and the ability to get a mortgage that doesn't lean heavily on the 'mort' part.
Yeah I don't really think a meaningfully larger amount people are traveling because Airbnb is an app that exist, so demand from tourism should stay flat, no?
Apartments in residential buildings are well.. apartments, not hotels. If you're a tourist, go to a hotel, I don't want a new set of loud obnoxius neighbors partying every few days next door to my apartment (and a shared wall in between). The apartment that should be rented out at cheaper monthly rate is now getitng rented out to lud tourists per daily rates, and that is a bad thing for locals living in that city. Some areas are already destroyed by airbnbs, so banning airbnbs (and all the other short-term rentals of residential apartments) should be banned.
An apartment building is owned collectively and with that comes a set of rules. In most places you aren't allowed to be a nuisance, even though you own a share of the house you don't get to dictate or do whatever you want just because you own something. Your property is just a part of a larger property, respect others or get the fuck out.
It's a pretty simple arrangement that one gets into when they purchase an apartment.
If you host a few guests a year, for a few days, and they are your friends or people who you might trust, no issue whatsoever.
A never ending cycle of tourists staying for 2-10 days as your neighbours? That's definitely a nuisance over time, very improbable that churning through 50-100 groups of different people per year won't create issues to neighbours.
If you don't see how it could be an issue I think only if you lived in a touristic place, neighbour to AirBnBs, to actually understand. I say that not to provoke you but because I feel it's hard to empathise when it's not your day-to-day life. Just this year I experienced that when staying at a friend's place in Lisbon, I shared it on another HN thread:
> As an anecdote: a month ago I stayed a few days (5-7) at a friend's place I was visiting who lives in Lisbon, just on his floor there are 4 AirBnBs (owned by the same person). Not only it was a nuisance with noise for most of the days I was there it was also a nuisance to have drunk British girls banging on your door at 02.00 in the night when they don't remember the fucking apartment they are supposedly going to. My friend mentioned it's not uncommon for that to happen, or to have a gag of people show up to a party in one of the apartments. Other people living in the building have complained to AirBnB, to the police, to the housing association, nothing really happens.
Because it's an apartment building with shared space, shared resources and shared investments. If your neighbors plot is a residential plot, he cannot build a pig farm there or a nuclear power plant. If your neighbors apartment is an apartment, he cannot have a shooting range, a bar, a strip club or a hotel there. There's a difference between occasional guests and airBnB, the same as there is a difference between a friend who helps you fix your car vs someone who regulary fixes cars for money.
As long as the property owner registers their short term rental with the local government and pays their taxes, and as long as their guests are respectful and don’t cause any trouble, why do you even care?
It's a limited resource being misused. It is in the interest of the locals for tourists to stay in hotels and apartments to be available for long(er) term rent for the locals. Barcelona was one of the first cities to ban short-term rentals (under 31 days), and hopefully not the last.
I think I get your perspective (but also you should really understand that your arguments are just going unidirectional instead of building a healthy dialog), but it made me wonder what really went wrong (or changed, depending on your perspective) from Hegel's utopian egalitarianism to how communism was implemented in practice a century later. I guess people just tend to "adapt" legal and governance theories built with perfectly good intentions to their advantage and then things go awry.
not looking at actual hard cold data but it's easy for someone to come to this annedonatal conclusion. In Asheville NC my entire neighborhood is being bought up by a corporation that is doing airbnb/VRBO. Also very hard to get ahold of anyone in case of a noise complaint.
Are you sure that the corporation is doing the buying? There are only a few of these and they are relatively small. There are some large property management firms (Vacasa, Evolve) who only work on behalf of individual property owners but appear as the owner of a property on Airbnb & Vrbo.
1. When the grandparent post said "corporations", they probably mean something like the Blackstones & Blackstones of the world, who are not small and both mentioned in this article about their residential housing activity: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-hous...
2. Having lived near Ashville, NC for two years, it's a particularly beautiful region and attractive vacation spot, so I especially believe it would attract corporate buyers looking to build an Airbnb vacation portfolio. Also not far from Atlanta, where Invitation Homes (a corporate buyer of residential housing) is active.
"When demand is inelastic, even relatively small changes in housing supply can cause significant changes in the cost of housing.10 This intuition is clearly validated in a number of careful empirical studies looking precisely at the effect of Airbnb introduction and expansion on housing costs." [https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...]
"At the median owner-occupancy rate zipcode, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices. Considering the median annual Airbnb growth in each zipcode, these results translate to an annual increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in house prices for the median zipcode in our data, which accounts for about one fifth of actual rent growth and about one seventh of actual price growth" [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832]
In high touristy areas you cannot buy a house at all at normal...ish prices, because buyers are overpaying a lot, becase they intend to rent it out via airbnb, so locals are getting pushed out of those areas.
What's so wrong with houses and apartments being for locals and long-term stay, and tourists just staying in hotels?
There’s nothing wrong with what you propose but it doesn’t offer a get-rich scheme, which is what really fuels short-term rental growth. It’s the new house flipping.
If you are travelling as a single person or a couple hotels sure. As a family the hotel experience is really bad or out of reach price wise. I'm just about to go on a vacation and we looked into hotels vs airbnb quite extensively. We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms. For the same as OK looking motel we can stay in a nice house with parking and a good size kitchen.
I don't want to like AirBnb and similar, but every time we've tried to go back to hotel or traditional B&B the experience has been poor and expensive. I guess the alternative is to not travel at all... we don't very often and we're only visiting a city in the same (small) country and also seeing friends so it's not like I feel we're massively touristy people paying to travel half way around the world then skimping on the accommodation.
But tourism is a luxury, and people renting out apartments on airbnb is making that apartment unafordable for long-term rental for locals, who actually have to live there. Sure, you might like the cheaper option of an unregulated hotel, but the locals would prefer you to just go to a normal hotel, since that's what the hotels were built for. At some point, even the local governments will have to bend over for the will off the 'masses' (compared to a few individuals profiteering from this), because people who have nowhere to live are in the group of people who have "nothing to lose anymore", and as a politician, you don't want a critical mass of those.
> We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.
What? I've stayed 6 deep in a single room with two beds. Mom, dad, and us four siblings. And there's more than a decade between the kids. Three hotel rooms would have been an unimaginable luxury.
I'm firmly in the camp of piling the family into one room. There's no better way to bond.
>We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.
I'll preface this by saying that I don't have kids. But, from my experience travelling with my parents when I was a kid... you really don't "need" three rooms.
That maybe the expectations you have now, but using AirBnb is pushing the externalities of those expectations onto the community you are visiting.
Bluntly put, access to affordable housing trumps affordable vacationing. If your problem is where to take your family for holidays, you are already out of touch with people struggling to find homes.
If money is flowing to the US to buy real estate, I say good. That’s more money being pumped into our economy, more money going to local communities via property taxes. Let’s build more real estate meet this demand.