You mean a hotel? Hotels are not inadequate for longer stays. If someone desires the comforts of a home, they can move there and actually rent/buy a home.

> The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels.

This is a werid entitlement. Tourists aren't entitled to overrun and impose a serious negative impact upon a town/city's housing supply because they feel like they 'deserve' to vacation there.

It's actually mostly the opposite. More money coming into a town tends to lift all boats - unless, like many contemporary American towns, building more homes in town is made de facto illegal through regulations and planning.

> Airbnb made it worse, because not only is there the traditional gentrification but now also people who own apartments can seek higher rents from tourists than with locals.

Equally those higher rents are possible because you're making tourism possible for people who probably couldn't afford to travel otherwise. The people staying in (regular apartment) Airbnbs tend to be lower-middle-class at best, and I don't think we should automatically care more about locals than tourists just because they happened to be born somewhere nice.

Cities should be for citizens... tourists belong in hotels.

Hotels in cities have to obey laws about fire risk and hygiene and noise and etc etc. They have accountable people to take responsibility for their guests.

That could be true for many AirBnB hosts, but there appears to be some who just don't care about the neighbours.

And tourism is planned into this with the way zoning permits work. But AirBnB skirts those rules. Also the negatives of losing housing in a city far outweigh any financial benefit that could come to it, especially as most won't be reaped by the people that are being forced out...or it will be taken from them in terms of increased rent because the supply is much smaller.

> The lack of regulations is an issue of local governments not catching up to tech companies, as usual, not Airbnb.

Or it's because AirBnB actively lobbies against it and refuses to enforce rules, saying it's up to the individual providers. They facilitate it, and often most things on AirBnB are illegal and against the zoning laws of whatever building they're being used for.

> What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well?

What a ridiculous question. Obviously I'm not against migrants. I'm against tourists thinking they have a right to live like locals. > The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.

> The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.

The locals benefit nothing from AirBnB. The landlords do, sure, but the actual residents and regular workers do not. If anything, it makes matters worse as rents are driven up, or they have to move further away from work. In the worst case scenarios, the town just becomes tourist-oriented and there's no other jobs left. That's a horrible thing as if the tourism ever dries up, the town is left up the creek.

But also tell the locals they benefit financially when their local bar closed down because the landlord thought it'd be better to make it a shop that caters towards tourists; or when all their neighbors move out because of the rambunctious drunken tourists coming in at 2 every night of the week; or when their landlord decides to evict them/up their rent because the landlord knows they can make more on AirBnB than renting to residences.

It's a wholly negative impact to everyone except those people who own the AirBnBs, who are often skirting multiple regulations, facilitated by AirBnB itself. It is a net negative for the city, and I know personally that housing crisis in at least one country (Ireland) has been facilitated by it, as the amount of houses on the market in Dublin doubled during the pandemic when tourism was shut down.

How do you know?

It's not going to show up as hotels always 100% full.

If there was demand from 10,000 tourists, and there were 7,000 hotel rooms and 7,000 AirBNB properties, then you could have 5,000 (71%) of hotel rooms occupied and 5,000 (71%) of AirBNB properties occupied and you'd think there was no shortage of hotel rooms.

But there'd be no shortage of hotel rooms only because of AirBNB. The reality is that there'd be demand from 10,000 tourists and only 7,000 hotel rooms.

> Usually tourist cities don't have a hard time building new hotels. Building new housing can be tough.

Well tough on them. Lots of things are tough. I have no sympathy -- new housing should be built, end of story. It's not sending a man to a moon, it's just regular old governance.

It's very clear that many tourists want to stay in AirBNB's. This is a valid consumer preference to stay somewhere that feels more like a home, in a place that feels like a neighborhood instead of a busy downtown, with a normal amount of space rather than a cramped hotel room, and at less cost. It seems silly to say that's a bad thing.

I mean, if you don't believe that the people who actually reside, work and live their lives permanently in an area are more deserving of the housing in that area than people who come maybe once a year for a week, then we'll never agree.

> The issue is that locals feel entitled to corral scary outsiders into certain zones, which is a high level of entitlement that exacerbates the problem.

> When you realize your argument just boils down to xenophobia and "outsiders bad" it mostly falls apart. Locals don't get special rights because they're locals.

Nobody said anything about 'scary outsiders', or xenophobia. I'm not advocating for the abolition of tourism. I'm saying tourism shouldn't come at the expense of the people who literally live and work and provide the amenities those tourists so desire when they visit. And AirBnB facilitates all of this. Locals absolutely should get special rights, especially in terms of housing, when they're the ones who will still be there after the tourists have left. The fact that you try to make this an argument about me being xenophobic or saying 'outsiders bad' shows you're not arguing in good faith.

The people that want 'tourism dollars' are not the same as those who want affordable rent in the city they were born and raised.

The key issue (at least in Europe) is that Airbnb has reduced the access barrier of landlords to a tax avoindance revenue stream.

If you are sharing a room in your house in the summer that's a side gig. If you are buying flats left and right and giving them to an agent to manage you Airbnb reservations then that is just a Hotel without the regulations and upfront costs and taxes that should come with it.

But there often is enough supply to meet the demand. The issue is tourists feeling entitled to living in a house, not the fact that all hotels are 100% booked all weekend.

> Also, I wonder if maybe lots of people don't like existing hotels for some reason?

I'm sure that's it, honestly. But when you're traveling away from home, well, don't expect to have a home waiting for you. That's the entitlement.

> It seems the locals get forced out wherever demand vastly exceeds supply, like in the beach town where I used to live, where so many people want to visit and there just isn't enough housing/hotels for them.

Or, just stop short-term rentals. Then the demand wouldn't exceed the supply (at least by the same margin). Or have specific areas designated for them (which most do, and which AirBnB conveniently ignores)

> The locals are opposed to more housing, so inevitably prices goes up and they eventually turn into weekly rentals.

I mean, I can understand why the locals would be opposed to more when there's enough for their demand, it's just the entitled tourists coming in and taking over things that makes it an issue.

That said, there are some fundamental differences with beach condos and mountain cabins (usually built to be rent out, not for locals) as opposed to what goes on in most AirBnB situations (built for residential, then moved away). The former two are generally considered in city planning, whereas people taking over residential neighborhoods is not.

Because Airbnbs aren't flophouses. They're holding usually just a couple or family, maybe a dozen people tops unless the place being rented is a really big detached house. Expecting them to be held to the same standards as hotels is not necessary. If this lack of compliance is so dangerous, then why are letting people live in these places full time?

> Visitors and residents have very different incentives. Tourists may wish to stay in cute residential areas, but they are not necessarily interested in being neighborly -- they're not particularly invested in the comfort and safety of the people around them, because they'll be leaving soon.

Tourists also spend more money while on vacation, especially on small businesses like restaurants and bars. More importantly, they bring this money in externally. More tourism attracts the ire of residents that now have to deal with out-of-town people walking around their neighborhood, but I have rarely seen someone complain about negative economic impact of tourism let alone make a coherent argument about why it's bad.

> People do a lot of gross stuff in a hotel that you probably don't want to encounter in your apartment building. Drugs, prostitution, loud parties.

Plenty of people do these things in their apartments, condos, and houses, too.

> No amount of "zoning" is going to make the commingling of apartments and hotels attractive to full-time residents, nor will any change in "zoning" make flophouses less profitable.

Tourists generally don't want to visit residential areas. Airbnb-ing instead of renting a hotel is usually less convenient because the former are further from the city center. When I used an Airbnb in Iceland it was more of a hassle because I effectively needed to rent a car (and then subsequently park a car) to get to the center of the city. It was worth it because of cost. If there were hotel rooms available at the same cost of Airbnb then I would have used that.

However, the number of hotels is usually kept artificially limited. This drives up the cost of renting hotel rooms, which benefits hoteliers. This is the main reason why Airbnb is so much cheaper than hotels. Hoteliers don't want to build more hotels because that would drive their costs down and their expenses up.

Well sure it's a valid preference (I'm not sure what an invalid consumer preference looks like), but city governments will (and should!) obviously prioritize the needs of residents over the wants of tourists. Residents want to live in the houses that are currently sitting vacant 4-5 days of the week, and completely empty through large swaths of the winter. It's horribly inefficient. Residents want tourists to stay in hotels, not drunkenly partying every weekend in their own neighborhoods. Residents don't want their rent to keep rising 3x faster than their wages.

It will be frustrating to some tourists and the folks sitting on short term rental empires, but the tourists don't get to vote on these issues and the Airbnb investor gurus are outnumbered.

In the coming years Airbnbs are going to get severely restricted, regulated, and taxed in every major metropolitan area that has both tourism and a housing shortage, because it's such an easy popular thing to do.

A society's benefit takes precedent over the desires of individuals. A society wants people living in their homes most of the time. They want the majority of housing for residents with very few, specific examples such as resort towns.

> It is the equivalent premise to saying that you should ban hotels so there are more long term residents, or known as, reduce short term housing stock to increase long term housing stock.

Again, that's not the case. Hotels are purpose built, temporary places for people to stay. AirBnB is made on the premise of converting existing long-term housing in to short-term rentals.

> You might also not hear anyone say they use cabs more because of lyft and uber but I assure you that they do. Hotels have not particularly suffered their market share because of airbnb, but airbnb is widely used in all major cities. Hostels probably took a hit, but nowhere near the usage airbnb has. Hotels ~=, Hostels -=, Airbnb ++++= => people are travelling more.

I don't have any numbers here and without doing it, I'm not going to hand wave at it anymore.

Huge part of this is actually state over-regulation. People just can't build houses. If local folks can earn some money on the side by renting out their houses, this is a good thing. Why tourists should be forced to pay for over-expensive hotels? Instead of pressing companies like AirBnB, people should press governments to remove regulations that are not necessary only serve to hire civil servants out of family members of ruling parties (not to mention pocketing bribes to give permissions to build) and make the money for the privileged.

By asking for even more regulation, you are just tightening the loop on your neck.

In vacation towns, the issue is that tourists are flooding out of hotels, and into livable dwellings.

Our hotel vacancy rates are rising just as fast as our home prices.

Perhaps the solution is tearing down hotels and building high-rise apartments in their stead, but it seems a bit wasteful compared to the alternative (regulating and taxing Airbnbs to nudge tourists back into the hotels designed for them).

As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends.

AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.

From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc).

It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.

As much? No. (However, I do strongly believe that locals who rent should have as much say; often their interests are not aligned with those of homeowners.)

I agree that in some cases, such as locations with huge numbers of tourists where local populations are being driven out, drastic measures are required.

In general, personally, I would favor a compromise involving a lot more regulation (e.g. of AirBnBs in apartment buildings) on the one hand, and making it easier to operate hotels on the other. I support homeowners who don't want informal hotels to be operated out of their apartment buildings; less so, homeowners who don't want hotels (whether formal or not) to be opened anywhere nearby.

And, again, this is the whole problem. Because that's a flat that could have gone to someone who actually lives and works in the local area, not a tourist. It's cheaper because it externalizes that cost.

I'm fine with hostels too, I see no problem with people choosing them. I'm not fine with converting residential homes into unlicensed hotels . It destroys the local community, and drives up prices for all the other people who are left trying to live there, and further feeds housing crises.

I really don't get this. If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident". It's vacations, you're a tourist, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't get what about the "experience" of a regular Airbnb is better than staying at a decent hotel.

Of course this does not apply to exotic Airbnbs.

What if we let people decide what they should/n't do with their own property instead?