Sifting through data looking for the unseen is one thing but this has got to be the biggest waste of time ever. AirBnB giving people a place to sleep. Yes, strangers in your apartment building..like you know your neighbors anyway.
It's not about people being uncomfortable with others in the building (a valid complaint, however).
It's about cities like NYC that have less than one percent vacancy rates, where a couple of AirBNB related effects put upward pressure on rents:
1) A person can stay in an apartment they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, pushing rents up (I personally know several people who maintain apartments like this, either by leaving for a couple days per month or maintaining an apartment after moving out of town.)
2) A full apartment stays off the market because it is being used as a dedicated hotel
Both of these make a difference in rent prices, though it's hard to say how much.
I'd be happy to see a ban on AirBNB while residential vacancy rates are lower than 3%. I love the service but not what it does to my already pretty unaffordable city.
Yes, it's true that in a city with an artificial housing scarcity like NYC, AirBnB alters the distribution of who gets to consume housing. It opens the market to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to purchase.
Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?
Maybe an argument would be that, on balance, illegal immigration keeps cost down in the service industries. Those savings are realized at the local, neighborhood level in NYC (think your local bagel shop or bodega), while tourism and AirBnB tend to have less of a broader, distributed effect on commerce throughout the entire city. That's just one point. I guess on the other hand there is a cost of social services for illegal immigrants that would have to be quantified to make that argument. I don't know, it's complicated.
Maybe put another way, illegal immigrants are part of the community, so their presence in the housing market must be balanced against their role in a more complex system.
But if you are just asking about the nature of Justice, I don't have any thoughts on that.
> Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?
There are lots of factors that impact housing supply and demand. Whether they should be regulated / stopped generally becomes a question once the public actively engages in discussing it (see foreign investment in the Pacific Northwest for an example).
Basically, if the public doesn't care, the politicians don't care. Since a pol's main incentive is to get re-elected, the issue has to become important to their constituents, otherwise it effectively doesn't matter.
Because AirBNB use in NY amounts to economic rent-seeking. That is fundamentally different than disallowing a class of people to participate in the economy.
I lived next to a popular airbnb rental. The lack of neighborly respect, trash, and noise are not imagined problems. At this point cops now cruise my rural dirt road once a day just because of it. Commercial activity in a residential area is a serious problem.
I just purchased a home next to an AirBnB house - it's a mixed bag - well, it's pretty much all downsides.
More Uber/Lyft/taxi traffic at random hours of night - check
Strange people coming and going, pickups at all hours - check
Trash cans are never brought back from the street - check
Yard care - non existent
Socialization - zero
There's 0 contribution to the neighborhood from an AirBnB house - I say this as a person who has no problem having a roommate in my own home. There's pretty much zero incentive for an AirBnB'er to give a shit about the neighborhood (I don't blame them).
This isn't an outlier. A lot of my friends live in houses that are pretty much crash pads (Arlington/DC area), and there's the same problem - when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community.
I have all the same problems but my neighbors are college students. Gentrification is a bitch. I'd say even 1-year residents are a detriment to the community.
> when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community.
I bought a house and lived in it with my wife at the same address for 15-or-so years, and wouldn't have recognized my next-door neighbor if I were to run into him at the mall. Why do accidents related to zip-code have anything to do with "community"?
EDIT. My other neighbor turned out to be a co-worker, in a distant group, and somehow was transferred into mine. He was a sucky engineer who spent all of his time politicking. I had little interest in spending time commiserating with him about office politics.
Nice enough neighborhood. Good schools. Not a lot of through traffic. People kept their houses and lawns up. But I don't know that I've ever felt any inclination to spend any time with anyone because of the accident of a street address numbering scheme. Am I alone in this?
Not really. I only know one neighbor, and only that because he is such an asshole. A large chunk of homes on my block are rentals, with a constant flow of new tenants.
I (as a non-green account but not a very old one) sometimes feel it's difficult to express my opinion on this website about Facebook, Uber, Amazon and AirBnB. My comments typically go negative for a bit without comments, then maybe there is a bit of conversation.
