[Variance]

> Forbidding short-term rentals, in theory, can increase the pool for annual rentals, thus bringing the cost down.

That's completely contrary to how supply and demand would work--if you forbid short-term rentals you move all the short-term demand into the annual market, increasing annual demand, which drives up prices and causes more scarcity.

Since short-term housing can house multiple people each year and annual housing can house only one per year, each new annual housing unit added will be accompanied by multiple new demanders that were previously in the short-term market and could have been all housed in one year by that apartment as a short-term rental. You increase annual supply by one and increase annual demand by more than one--likely by more than half a dozen--and so prices skyrocket as demand outstrips supply and the shortage is exacerbated.

Of course, city governments are not exactly the gold standard of understanding economics when passing housing laws.