[PaulDavisThe1st]

Lots of assumptions buried in here.

There are rural/tourist-dependent communities that had an adequate supply of housing when the only visitor accomodation was licensed as a hotel/motel/inn/B&B/hostel. They didn't need a lot of extra, but some slack to accomodate tourist season workers, and occasional new arrivals.

Then AirBnB came along and converted not just the slack, but some residential property that would otherwise have been available for long term lease, into much more profitable short term rentals.

Income at licensed residential stays sometimes drops; short term and long term housing options either vanish or are reduced; problems begin to occur that were not present before.

None of this is in any way dependent on the failures caused by zoning, permitting and housing policy.

This story has been repeated at tourist locations across the world.

AirBnB was fundamentally a message to anyone with residential property: you can make more money with it as a short term rental than via any other use. This is why in many locations we've seen new construction of residential property intended solely for short term rentals. Nobody wanted to build that stuff when it was only going to be LTR; AirBnB changed the game.

[eszed]

You and GP are talking past each other a bit, because they're speaking to the general case, whilst you're narrowing it to tourist-dependent areas. I grew up in a tourist region, and it's been ruined (from the point of view of those of us who are from there, and might have wanted to stick around) exactly as you say.

The complicating factor (which they miss) for a tourist region is that if your "product" is (in part) Small Town Charm, or Rural Character, then you can't build, baby, build without destroying the economic underpinning of the entire community. I wish my hometown had allowed for more hotels (like, decades ago - they were horribly regulator-captured for ages), and had the wisdom to restrict STR before it became such a thing.

For anywhere with a non-tourism based economy, however, I think they are correct: increasing supply is the only possible solution.

It only occurs to me upon writing this that areas without any existing tourist infrastructure are becoming tourist-dependent on the basis of STR, which might be the worst of both worlds. Those places need to allow hotels and (actual) B&Bs, before they ruin their communities through STR-tourist dependence.