You don't need to ban them, just make them meet the same regulations on safety and zoning that regular hotels have to
I agree. A lot of the trouble that Airbnb causes can be mitigated with simple regulations that we already have in place. Additionally, we should recognize that Airbnb is currently filling a void in the market that hotels aren't currently filling. There are times when people want to rent a place to stay for a full week or a month and also not have to pay to eat out every night. Airbnb allows you to rent a place that's generally cheaper for longer stays and also provides a basic kitchen including cookware and dishes. Hotels just don't have that unless you pay a premium. The only other thing they offer, which I'm on the fence about, is the ability to rent a place in close proximity or directly in a specific neighborhood or town as opposed to whatever area has a hotel to host tourists. On the one hand, that's super nice for exploring cities and doing non-touristy things. On the other hand, residents deserve some separation from tourists especially since they don't all behave. If hotels can find a way to fill these gaps, then I'd be ok with banning Airbnb. But we can also just regulate Airbnb 🤷
I feel like several advantages of Airbnb comes specifically from the lack of regulation. I'm speculating, but I imagine installing kitchens and maintaining them costs quite a lot as a hotel, with probably stricter and more expensive regulations compared to an Airbnb. I wouldn't be surprised if Airbnbs were regulated similarly to hotels, that they'd be priced higher due to all the costs. It doesn't make sense to me that a hotel, with 10s or hundreds of units, where not all units have to be rented out at once, is more expensive than a single property home where the whole unit must be rented out at once, and it takes up a bigger space. not to mention the inefficiency of repairs, and cleaning.
You might be right on the potential cost, but aren't all Residence Inns basically this? I don't think they cost that much more than other hotels.
Another way you could handle that is that any property you own after your 1st or 2nd, automatically attracts commercial property tax rates.
That should not disallow private individual to rent a spare room, or holiday home, but it will kill off the investment businesses that specialise running airbnb syndicates.
Additionally, if a property has not had a full time occupant for at least 9 of the 12 months in a year, it is subject to a wealth tax based on its value.
That should deal with the investment firms that just sit on massive stocks of empty homes and business properties, feeding off the increasing prices they are creating themselves, while adding no value and offering no service.
Also kick the CEO and everybody in his general vicinity in the nuts. This should be law.
Tough, but fair
Everyone who says "ban them" seems like they have never left the US. In Europe and Latin America, there are a ton of other websites that locals use for the same thing. Before the web, you would call up a few places listed in a guidebook and rent it over the phone.
I dislike Airbnb because it's expensive. The concept of "renting a room" in a vacation area will never go away. But the idea of $100 cleaning fees, when they just change the sheets and wipe down surfaces (30 minutes total) is dumb.
what about not allowing companies to buy hundreds of houses as rental property?
Focusing on AirBnB is better in my opinion because of the difference between the two.
A company buying a home to rent still has to rent the property, so they aren't removing the housing supply. In contrast, a person or corporation buying a home to use as an AirBnB is removing housing from the market.
Companies should not own houses. Residents of houses should own their own houses.
Nobody should own someone else's house. A roof over one's head is a basic human right. Not an extortionate investment.
The problem with companies owning hundreds of houses is that they hire property management companies to manage these houses that were built by the lowest bidders and everybody blames each other when something needs to be maintained and the maintenance never gets done and the people living in the houses suffer because they are paying their hard-earned money to these companies while their shoddily-built houses are falling apart.
remember there are real actual humans hiding behind the facade of these corporations, greedy extortionate millionaires & billionaires thriving on exponential dollars from poor people's paychecks, and this needs to be stopped.
Good. Sorry to every mom and pop who treated housing like an investment, but at least you still have the house. Hope they slash the market 90%. Hope everyone who's been waiting for a decade gets a place to live. Hope opportunistic landlords choke and go bust when they can't pay three mortgages on their tenants' salaries anymore. Housing is a human right.
It's definitely not going to slash it 90% to do that you'd have to make moves to guarantee houses are always losing value, much in the same way cars do, so that you have a thriving used house market for people that can't afford, or don't care, to buy new.
That means either implementing the construction of houses with materials that have a short life, or forcing houses to be torn down after, let's say 50 years.
I'd prefer just getting rid of ownership of property, but i dont know if we are ready for that as a society.
How about we ban companies like Blackstone from buying up all the auction homes, lightly flipping them and then putting them back on the market as overpriced rentals?
They're a big reason for our housing shortage.
Why not both? Airbnb severely increases prices, and properties bought by corporations do the same. I'm tired of not doing anything because "what about "
Yeah I'd like to still be able to afford a goddamn vacation.
AirBnB isn't even really worth it from a cost perspective:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/are-airbnbs-more-cost-effective-than-hotels
People are suffering by the millions as a result of the housing crisis, and AirBnB is contributing. So fuck AirBnB, it isn't worth the price society pays. No such corporation or service should exist.
What about if we crowdfund a competitor to blackstone that rents out the houses at like a 20% discount to market rate and earmark a portion of rent collected each month for the tenants to have an equity stake in the property. Then more people would want to rent from us and eventually the vampires would lose interest. I wonder if something like that would be possible. Instead of legislating them out, we buy them out. But it does require a critical mass of people willing to set aside a bit of money that they don’t expect a market return on. But maybe if they thought of it more as charity.
Well, besides the fact that I imagine most people in the target audience would rather buy their first house than crowdfund discounted rental rates...
Do you pinky swear that once you overtake Blackstone , the 150 billion dollar company, you'll have the same intentions?
It's bizarre. My house makes as much per year as I do.
propertys have more rights than humans
Now if only they would stop framing the dropping of home prices as a bad thing.
Don't attack the homeless, attack the lack of homes.
If you think banning Airbnb is going to solve the housing crisis outside touristic spots, I think you might be in for a rude awakening.
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale. Probably lots of rentals with landlords not in it for profit, think Vienna-style.
All landlords are in it for the profit. They should instead do more condominiums, so you can own the space you live in. We shouldn't have to live the rest of our lives paying rent.
Government-owned apartments don't need to have a profit-focus, and can instead have a service-focus.
You'll still be paying continuously for a condominium - there are plenty of things related to living in one of those that aren't free. Having an ownership-focused model of housing and incentivizing as such comes with a whole host of undesirable problems as well, so it's not strictly speaking a silver bullet. That being said, housing coops can under the right circumstances be a force for good.
True, but he means nationalized, so publicly owned, publicly funded.
Not only is rent there seen as temporary ownership (same in Germany), with really strong protections but the rent itself is like $300-$400 euros a month, barely anything for a top tier apartment that's basically a solarpunk megabuilding.
I honestly think that's preferable to paying mortgages for also for-profit banks and 'climbing the ladder'.
The lack of ownership as an option also prevents the accumulation of such wealth that someone can buy it all out and make it all worse again
Is this what responsible governments do? I would have figured that Airbnb and the ~~gamblers~~ investors in the housing market would have ~~bribed~~ lobbied hard against this.
~~gamblers~~ ~~investors~~ SCALPERS
I only just now noticed that the AirB&B logo looks like a vagina with balls
Airbnbussy
Was there no housing crisis before AirBnB?
There was but AirBNB et al made it worse. The other piece of it is private equity firms buying up homes and using them for long term rentals.
"entrepreneurs" were going out and buying houses en masse to put on airbnb, turning long term homes into short term rentals with exorbitant prices.
There was one before, but AirBNB and shit like it made it magnitudes worse.
Did sites like VRBO for vacation and large house rentals exist for AirBnb? I didn't really book those at that point. While I agree airbnb should probably be replaced by hotels (like in the past) was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
AirBNB used to be about just renting a room in your house out to people. Before it got big it wasn't for being a multi-property short-term landord.
Actually, vrbo was more like that - vrbo was around long before airbnb and was meant to be a way to help market your short term rental or like rent your vacation house out while you werent using it.
The problem is they each fill a niche, the need for short term accommodation with privacy for a group, but its super easy to take advantage and start listing huge numbers of properties to make lots of money if youre a ~~leech~~ landlord - which is part of why we're in such a bad situation now with the housing market.
You can ban the company, but you can't ban the concept (which has been around forever)
The concept is great. The company has caused untold damage to the housing market.
La times article about it (may be a pay wall) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-23/palm-springs-capped-airbnb-rentals-now-some-home-prices-are-in-free-fall
This seems like a good thing. 1.5 million dollar homes aren't selling well? Maybe cheaper homes or apartments will have better mass appeal.
I still think that instead of banning perfectly valid use cases of housing to lower prices (forcefully decreasing demand), we should focus more on just building more stock to satisfy all needs?
And before someone says "we can do both!" we aren't. The majority of attention is going to things like this, and corporate investment (which is valid, tbh).
The more houses they build the more airbnbs there will be.
The reality is that there are enough empty houses to house everyone who needs them, the problem is that those who own them either want them empty as a holiday home they can later sell as an investment, or rented out, as an investment.
Because that's what housing is today.
Which is why the only real solution is to decommodify housing, since it's a human right and should be treated as such, while the profits of the rich are not, and should not.
Omg, best news story of the day. This brought me a shit ton of joy.
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