The article points out that Airbnb is constantly trying to undermine local laws that are trying to provide affordable housing. A couple of links in you'll find this quote from the NY City Council:
"Airbnb consistently undermines the City's efforts to preserve affordable housing, and regularly attempts to thwart regulations put in place to protect New York City residents... Despite claims to self-regulate and crack down on illegal listings, Airbnb continues to be complacent in the illegal practices of over half of their hosts."
I agree that it's probably pointless to appeal to a company that has no interest in following laws that impact the bottom line, but at some point externalizing the costs of regulation shouldn't be a business model.
I have taken a special interest in this story as I have been negatively impacted by having someone use AirBnB in my apartment building.
Every step of the way, from what I can tell, AirBnB has been at best deliberately obtuse and at worst actively lying. This post seems to be an example of the latter.
When AirBnB says things like:
> The vast majority of our hosts are simply renting out their own homes on an occasional basis. The law was never meant to target them, and we now believe the Attorney General did not mean to target regular New Yorkers either.
They are purposefully clouding the issue and making it seem like it is about things it's not. Renting out your home on any basis, no matter how occasional, is illegal if you are not present. It doesn't matter if you're a "regular New Yorker" instead of someone who operates a business renting out multiple AirBnB apartments.
The simple fact is that the vast majority of AirBnBs in NYC are illegal, and AirBnB has access to the data they need to fix the issue without significant cost to them, except for vastly shrinking their, illegal, market.
It's hard to sympathise with Airbnb if the facts as presented in the article are accurate.
It is against the law in New York City to rent out an apartment for less than a month, a 2010 measure meant to curb unregulated hotels. [NY Attorney General] Mr. Schneiderman says 60 percent of Airbnb rentals in New York are illegal.
If that is the case, then it seems entirely reasonable for the legal authorities to seek the identity of those offering those rentals and prosecute them. These people aren't "regular New Yorkers", as Airbnb claim, if they're regularly and systematically breaking the law.
It might not be a good law in some people's opinion, but the correct solution for those people is to make a case for better laws, not to break the existing ones and just hope they'll get away with it.
Then, a few years ago, Silicon Valley had a collective insight: Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Maybe not so much, as it turns out that laughable arguments about being a new category of "microentrepreneur" operator that is neither person nor business and is therefore somehow outside the law are treated with the contempt they deserve by the legal authorities.
In a blog post, Airbnb said the regulators’ plan was to accuse Airbnb hosts in court “of being bad neighbors and bad citizens.” It added: “They’ll call us slumlords and tax cheats. They might even say we all faked the moon landing.”
Indeed, it's hard to imagine why people who say things like that don't get taken entirely seriously.
I'm all for disruption, and I sympathise with the little guy start-up trying to compete against big guy established players, but that's the game. You don't get to win by just ignoring the rules. This summed up the whole situation for me:
Micah Lasher, Mr. Schneiderman’s chief of staff, fired back that “being innovative is not a defense to breaking the law.”
Put me in the camp that's very anti-AirBnB as a resident who doesn't want where I lived turned into a hotel. I live in NYC. It's a problem.
None of this is a surprise, so much so that AirBnB seems to be aware of this and is acting in a way that's, at best, ethically challenged and, at worst, illegal eg deleting listings before giving data to the state of NY that "shows"
most hosts only have one unit [1].
If people want to run a hotel, there's a legal structure for this. And zoning. Go do that. I personally applaud efforts to shut down illegal hotels.
> Airbnb unfairly plays up this angle while ignoring the fact that many hosts are larger businesses that are taking up housing stock to run an unregulated hotel. There are also plenty of people holding multiple leases (especially in NYC) to rent one place out on Airbnb where you can easily make more than the rent per month.
Not just "many". In New York specifically, it's literally over 50% that are illegal, by virtue of being whole-apartment rentals. Whole-apartment rentals of less than 30 days are not legal.
Ironically, many of the people that AirBNB used to use in their PR campaign as the faces of the "little guy" using AirBNB to "make their rent" were actually people who lived in rent-controlled apartments, which is (almost always) illegal in practice, even if the whole apartment is not being rented.
This article is ridiculous and makes me think the author doesn't understand the way the world works.
Do they really think airbnb will self-regulate and solve the affordable housing problem? Just because the author asked them to?
These problems need to be tackled by local and state governments. We should never trust a corporation to act in the people's best interest. The goal is to make money.
Housing in NYC is expensive. Zoning laws exist in part to control housing costs. Airbnb is seen as a way to circumvent these laws by facilitating short-term listings in otherwise long-term residential areas.
Airbnb released a detailed snapshot of its NYC listings in order to minimize such concerns and prevent restrictions on its business. However, individuals who had been consistently collecting similar data from Airbnb's website noticed that the snapshot was misleading. Airbnb had instituted a crackdown on "bad" listings immediately prior to the snapshot, but allowed them to return right after.
I disagree. (Obviously, since I submitted the article.) The regulatory debate about Airbnb in New York as I had always heard it framed was about "outdated" hospitality regulations that needed to be "updated" to accommodate the sharing economy. In this context, I think it is widely assumed that the New York regulations are focused on sanitation, safety, etc. concerns for hotel guests. What this points out is that, in reality, the hospitality laws (at least in part) serve to prevent the extremely high demand for hotel rooms in new York City from gobbling up large chunks of housing inventory, thus driving up already-astronomical housing prices. Hence the ban on renting out whole apartments, or single rooms for more than 30 days: this sort of space could plausibly be used as residential housing for New Yorkers. New York would rather this capacity be sold on the residential housing market than made available for tourists on Airbnb. A person might disagree with this policy goal, but it does not strike me as archaic or obviously stupid.
Also, it is written by "the Editorial Board." That is, it is the "official" position of the newspaper. If you would like to know who is on the Editorial board, you can follow the link at the bottom of the article. Or this one: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/opinion/editorialboard.ht... It's interesting that you find this aspect of the editorial so objectionable because I believe, in most circles, an editorial by the Editorial Board of a publication is taken much more seriously than editorials by whomever the Editorial Board allows to write in their paper which do not necessarily reflect the view of the publisher.
The fact of the matter is that most Airbnb listings in NYC are illegal, and pretty much everyone I know that lists their place on it is aware it's against the law. They do it anyways.
Airbnb is trying to cooperate as best they can without giving up too much of their users privacy as they need to get laws changed here in NYC (and other cities) if they want to keep operating in these markets.
2 other common reasons to organize against airbnb are 1) neighborhoods don't like transient guests when their expectation was that the neighborhood were permanent residents and 2) airbnb is avoiding state taxes
There are laws in New York City that say (with good reason) that you can't just turn your home into a hotel. New York is simply enforcing the law.
If Airbnb really has the public support they claim then it should be easy to change the law. The reality is a lot (likely vast majority) of New Yorkers really don't want the status quo to change. The politicians know this and hence why they took this path.
Good. I know that Chesky is trying to pretend that this is about people who occasionally share their homes, but that's bullshit. There are a lot of people who are stuck living next to illegal, untaxed hotels because one of their neighbors AirBNBs their place full time.
I know that a lot of people on this site think that if you add the words 'on the internet' you should be exempt from all regulation and taxation, but that's just not how the world works.
I hope that the people who've been profiting from the lack of enforcement are forced to play on a level playing field.
Disclaimer: my experience with NYC AirBNBs have been incredibly negative, including people listing with fake names, revealing that they'd given fake addresses at the last minute (when it was already too late to change plans), showing deceptive photos, and giving false descriptions.
What NY is mainly worried about (and has the strongest public support for them worrying about) is AirBnB being used as a way of de facto running unlicensed hotels. People don't like discovering that the room down the hall from where they live has essentially been converted into a hotel room, with customers coming and going regularly, no hotel tax paid, and none of the usual health/safety regulations applied (industrial-strength fabric cleaning, etc.). By comparison, someone renting out a spare room now and then is not as likely to produce social or health problems, and most of the public probably views it as benign, even if also technically a violation of your lease.
I don't like this kind of thing as a customer, either. When I look for a place on AirBnB, I expect it to be someone's actual house/apt, which they treat as their own, because they also live there. If that's not the case, it should be made really clear up front.
I don’t know about other places, but Airbnb has been a mixed bag for NYC: I’ve seen it used to keep housing stock off the market, to dodge the obligations associated with keeping a property livable, and to essentially run entire illegal hotel businesses without attracting regulatory (including safety) scrutiny.
How has Airbnb not been sanctioned by more local governments seeking to curb this behavior? Just like Napster, Uber, and all of the other "sharing economy" apps that have popped up in the past 20 years, Airbnb's profit model hinges on the ability of its users to skirt local laws and operate in this very gray area.
It seems like very short-sighted planning by city councils who impose some nominal license/approval fee in exchange for the long-term health of their own communities. I don't see how this is sustainable.
Did you read the article? NY state has cracked down on Airbnb hosts (as a result of hotel industry lobbying) to the point where most people don't even bother. So what's left is overpriced and poor quality.
AirBnB violates NY's illegal hotel law (e.g. http://www.scribd.com/doc/142650911/Decision-and-Order-for-N...). AirBnB actively promotes in New York (they have been actively airing ads on local TV) and made no effort (at least, when the issue first flared up) to make users aware of the relevant laws.
"Airbnb consistently undermines the City's efforts to preserve affordable housing, and regularly attempts to thwart regulations put in place to protect New York City residents... Despite claims to self-regulate and crack down on illegal listings, Airbnb continues to be complacent in the illegal practices of over half of their hosts."
I agree that it's probably pointless to appeal to a company that has no interest in following laws that impact the bottom line, but at some point externalizing the costs of regulation shouldn't be a business model.
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