[drewcrawford]

There is a difference between what you are describing (commercial zoning) and what AirBnB does (length of tenancy). Commercial zoning is much more obviously a legitimate government function than length of tenancy, which is a textbook economic rigidity.

But to answer your question seriously, I think the Japanese have a better zoning system than in the US, theirs allows for, in limited quantities, a bar in a residential neighborhood, or even an apartment next to a machining shop. The insight here is that it does no one any good to have a long commute, and so they have a system that affords landowners choices about the kind of neighbors they want to have, rather than dumping them all into residential-only zones.

[tptacek]

So what you're suggesting is that it should be OK for me to buy a bungalow in the middle of Oak Park and literally open up a hotel in it? That's a coherent argument, but not one I think a lot of people share.

[drewcrawford]

I don't know how to answer your question because I don't know what it means to say something "should be OK".

If you're asking if I would prefer to live in an Oak Park where hotels were legal as opposed to where hotels were illegal, of course. If you're asking me if I would be on board with storming into an established community and rewriting their zoning codes over their objections, probably not, although there may be exceptions. If you're asking me if I would sleep well at night while operating a hotel in Oak Park, then I would probably want to meet the surrounding neighbors and decide for myself how much the activity would disturb them, look at the size of the easement, what the noise floor is like, and so on. If you're asking me if I as a homeowner would be annoyed at a neighboring hotel, it's possible, but I'm annoyed at a lot of things, most of which I seek no special right to change.

Those are four answers to your hypothetical, but I don't know whether one of them, or any of them, are the kind of answer you're looking for.

[tptacek]

Sure. I think I was fixating on "length of tenancy" as an illegitimate focus for zoning regulation (the implication I took from your comment). But we're pretty far from the original topic of the thread now.