[jimbob45]

If you ban AirBNB, you'll immediately get 50,000 (or however many) houses back on the market. You would otherwise need to build 50,000 houses, which would surely require a great deal more effort. Why would you not reach for the lowest-hanging fruit first when attempting to increase the housing supply?

[CuriouslyC]

Because stopping someone from renting out their house to make some extra cash is overreach. Stopping firms from buying up tons of houses with the explicit purpose of airbnb on the other hand? More reasonable.

[asdff]

Because you do that, and a decade goes by and you need 50,000 homes again to meet demand, and then what? Its better to put in a mechanism from the start that will allow for this many homes to be built to meet demand. In most high demand markets, they are already built out to the limits of the zoned capacity and cannot add much of any new units of housing until zoning limits are eased. Zoning is the real low hanging fruit here. Back that off and the market will start to right the ship before long building capacity to match demand incurred by job growth.

[doctorwho42]

Why not both? Also stop foreign buyers from parking their money in our housing market.

[jeduan]

where did you get this 50,000 housing units number from? This article quotes that New York got 15,000 units from their ban. Are you saying that Montreal has 3x as many short term rentals as New York?

https://www.wired.com/story/6-months-after-new-york-banned-a...

[HWR_14]

The article quotes has a 15,000 unit delta after closing a loophole, not after banning short-term rentals. The article also claims enforcement on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, etc. is still lacking.

[j45]

Because housing supply has been needed to increase for 20 years and builders won’t do it to maintain or grow their margins.

The disruption is needed on the supply side to build more.

[pitaj]

Because it's been tried and there's little evidence it actually works.