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Thousands of Airbnbs and other short-term rentals are expected to disappear from rental platforms as New York City begins enforcing tight restrictions
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- Title
- The End of Airbnb in New York
- Authors
- Amanda Hoover, Angela Watercutter, Steven Levy, Akanksha Singh, Eve Andrews, Parth M.N., Khari Johnson, Gregory Barber, David Nield, Peter Guest, Will Knight
- Published
- Sep 5 2023
- Word count
- 548 words
They should start giving a cash incentive to people for snitching on illegal airbnbs in their buildings. Nothing major, like maybe a couple hundred bucks. That would get them found out real quick.
Housing is far more important than providing tourists with nice places to stay. Airbnbs are killing the rental markets in tons of cities. There are 1.5+ million of these places that people could be living in used for parties and hotels in a time where no one can afford to buy a home.
Not just cities, it's a problem in the rural US, too. Anywhere with tourism appeal, short-term rental investors have multiplied like some kind of bacterial infection. I live up in northern New England and it's near impossible for seasonal workers (like those who build trails, or lifties at ski resorts, or servers for seasonal restaurants) to afford to live here any more. The only ones left either have a spouse working a highly-compensated remote job or bought a house 20 years ago.
I live in a small GA town and have had a dozen text messages from rando "property management" companies wanting to buy my house. Most of the houses around me turned into rentals.
Hell I was at the barber shop last year and some douchenozzle wouldn't shut up about all the properties he bought and rented out. Kept calling it "free money"
The sad thing is that it pretty much is free money, I hope the rate hikes and the housing market crash crush them if it happens
I know ideas like this mean well but dear god just imagining the insane volume of false positives, bad faith neighbors, and people trying to game the system just makes me despair.
It's a real problem that the moment you offer an incentive for something, especially cash, you're going to get flooded with useless nonsense. Sure you only payout if the claims pan out, but now you have to investigate them all and for some people the pettiness of having someone investigate you is the goal.
You have got to put the onus on the company. Major fines/potential loss of license for any illegal location hosted. They can then put it on those who want to host to properly verify. The governments only job then is to audit places like airbnb, and all they need for proof is "well you let them host this location and you have no proof of legality so we'll take our check made out to cash"
Yeah Airbnb is already sueing local governments left and right over stuff like this, I'm sure they don't want to work with them to reduce their profits.
We need more community lead stuff for things like this, people need to get mad and complain, it can't just all be on politicians
I recently (within the last year) took advantage of an "illegal" airbnb listing in NYC. The stay was nice, and the owner was nowhere to be found the whole time. It was the same price as a hotel room in the area, but with the benefit of being an entire apartment. I can definitely see how it is strangling the housing market though, so many people owning extra properties to turn a profit via renting is strangling the already severely limited housing supply in the city. Definitely felt bad contributing to the problem, but I'm poor and the deal was too good to pass up. The people who live in the city should really have first pick on available apartments.
I always feel conflicted on these issues. On one hand, I 100% understand the tight housing issues that AirBNB is making worse, but as a parent with a child with disabilities and severe behavior issues, these whole house AirBNB rentals are the only way we can stay anywhere. Hotels just don't work for us, they have always asked us to leave due to noise complaints (which are honestly understandable).
Luckily, NYC still has AirBnB-style rentals, there are just going to be far fewer of them due to the limited number of short-term rental licenses that the city will provide. I foresee a lot of other places following suit, where there will still be options for a full house rentals, just not at their usual abundance. I think most people realize that there are situations where a rental house is the best option for visitors, but wealthy people and organizations gutting the local housing market to take advantage of the business model is something to avoid.
You may end up having to pay more due to the limited selection, but the alternative is everyone paying more due to skyrocketing housing costs and limited availability.
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Don't know if this is a hot take, but this seems to be a band-aid solution that also hurts "trying to make ends meet" more than the prolific landlords. I don't really have a problem with a single homeowner/apartment renters who wants to rent out a spare room or their entire home while they are out for vacation or something. I do have problems with the elite who buy up a bunch of homes with no intent to ever live there or an intent to set prices so high it prices out even the middle class.
I think it also points out another problem:
Oh wonderful. I wonder who gets these exemptions. Surely not the prolific landlord. Given that the article also notes actual hotels as "small and expensive", this may just make those remaining lean into that very issue even more.
Problem: Rent is too damn high.
Solution: Ban AirBNBs.
I believe an actual solution would have addressed multiple issues at once, especially foreign investors, but mega-landlords in particular.
What I suspect is this will shutter private individuals that rent out a secondary property. Hotels and and those who own several properties I’m willing to bet will be unaffected.
We talk about e-shitification and airBnB certainly suffers from it as well. When I pull up listings the vast majority these days are just hotels and chains, places you could basically find on any other travel booking site. I’m imagining the few private listings that are left will get pushed further down the results and then get riddled with add-on fees that mask the daily rate.
Meh. I have no love of megaconglomerate landlords, but I also have no love for small landlords either.
Nobody should have a second property for the purposes of extracting value. Full stop.
Your comment is quite short sighted. My fellow small time landlords and I are essential cogs in the the supply of housing, particularly low cost housing. You'll note that not many big companies invest in basement suites, or garage suites or backyard/laneway houses. We do.
You'll also note that not everyone WANTS to buy a house so they will be renting from someone. And after years of experience with large, faceless corporations we have no problem renting our properties because we actually have a face to face relationship with our tenants. Being a good landlord is all about being in the people business, not just the property investment business.
I'm fine with small time land lords but this is also only an issue because of the insane rental market. Not many people want to live in a basement or a garage, they are forced to because of their financial situation. If more rentals were available - i.e. removal of airbnbs and apartments that sit empty either as a way to drive up rents by large property owners - then folks could live in a comfortable apartment rather than a converted storage space.
That said, I would prefer folks with one extra property making a little extra income rather than a real estate behemoth squeezing the market.
Landlords are essential because renting will always be necessary and/or preferable to some. People who move a lot, people who haven’t decided what suburb of a city they want to live in, young adults who want the experience of a house share with friends, people in new relationships who want to test out living together, people who don’t want the responsibility of maintaining a property, people who are on a working holiday for a year etc etc etc.
What would you propose they do if there are no landlords?
I believe the alternative is public housing, or housing that is administered not-for-profit.
Knowing how things like that are run I can’t believe anyone would think it an improvement on private landlords!
I can! I've had 8 landlords. The megaconglomerate owning my apartment complex was the best, because they actually performed maintainence.
Everyone else was a small private landlord, with the property ranging from 'total disrepair' to 'coat of paint and caulk covering total disrepair.'
And of those 8 landlords, 5 illegally kept my security deposit.
We don't need landlords, at least as they exist. Small landlords are harder to hold accountable, as their slights are easily masked by lack of exposure.
But you aren’t arguing for that. You said public and not-for-profit, which right now are run atrociously and I would predict would continue that way or, more likely, get worse if expanding to all non-owner/occupied homes.
And just to counter-anecdote, I’ve had that many landlords or more (I might be forgetting some), all private, and they’ve all been great
I think it's a bit disingenuous to argue that all private landlords are bad/good or all public/NFP housing is bad/good. There are clearly examples of all four of these outcomes.
I only brought it up in response to the question "what would you propose they do if there are no landlords?" as it is the de facto alternative.
Personally, what I would do if there were no landlords would be to rejoice, but that's just, like, my opinion, man ;)
Ah sorry I thought the person I replied to last was also you. Didn’t check the names!
Agree about landlords but I’ve yet to see public housing that is run well. It might be possible but I think it improbable.
I just think it’s a little naive to think getting rid of all landlords would work out well for renters. It might work well for people who want to buy a house, but people who don’t would pay the price
There are public housing models that work. I've lived in and around some great subsidized community cooperative housing. It was a mix of condo-style ownership shares (with maintenance fees), and rental units. Well-maintained, with high community involvement, a wide range of income levels (up to a very upper middle class income limit), ethnicities, and ages. There were common buildings and green spaces. There were long waiting lists to get in, though, with priority given to families with children.
I haven't spent enough time digging into why this model worked, and why it's not more common in the U.S. It's probable that the political desires to get government out of everything, and the relatively low density just made further similar projects infeasible. In fact, those great housing projects are now all converted to Section 8 voucher housing, the wait lists are up to two years... that kind of subsidy provides exactly zero incentive to build more moderately priced rental housing, and allows degraded quality for what's available.
No apologies necessary, just wanted to clarify my original response.
I imagine the ideal is probably a mix of both things as the market has folks who prefer not to own as well as those who are unable up own. I think both options serve either party in different capacities.
Aside - I love this platform. Thanks for having an open and rational conversation with me. It's nice to amicably disagree or just have a nuanced back and forth without anyone being sent to Nuremberg.
Yeah I mean if we’re taking utopias I suppose all housing would be totally free, but within the confines of how our world and society and people work I think we have it pretty ok. Though it sounds like america needs a lot more regulation for landlords! I think that’s actually what people should be fighting for rather than no landlords at all.
It’s so much nicer than The Other Place isn’t it?!
I would rather have people who want to use a home temporarily have to go through the comparatively minor inconvenience of buying and selling over a short time frame than have such a huge chunk of an entire generation priced out of ever owning homes.
“Comparatively minor” is horrendously understating how much money and time it takes to buy and sell a house
I'm not sure exactly how much money and time you lose by not ever being able to own a home and likely not being able to retire because you literally have to pay rent until you die, but I'm positive it has a greater negative impact on your quality of life.
Both are shit options. It’s just not viable to be forced into home ownership, that’s a naive solution
Perhaps without for profit rentals a system for temporary living accommodations that isn't so predatory and destructive could be devised.
I don't know where you are but in the vast majority of places, buying a house is not a "minor inconvenience". When you buy you have several additional layers of complications you don't have to deal with as a renter:
I know a bad landlord can make your life hell, but trust me, running into problems anywhere in the buying, homeowning and selling process will make you wish all you had to deal with is a bad landlord.
It is still minor compared to never being able to own a home at all.
This is not relevant to the comparison. If you can't afford a down-payment, that's covered by my point - it's bad that homes are so expensive. AgnesNutter gave several other reasons to prefer renting, and in most of those cases you'd have the down-payment already, likely from selling the home you previously lived in.
Again, moving from owned-home that you've recently sold to owned-home that you've recently bought means you likely have most of the money required for the new home, and a loan if any will be much smaller and easier to get. If you do not own a home to sell you're covered by my point.
This is a cost, but it's less than the cost of renting a home for that period, and you have equity in the home in the end.
Again, less than the cost of rent, otherwise there would be no landlords.
I'm generally against HOAs but I don't see how living in an area with an HOA for a short time is that much different than living in one for a long time. If anything the increased ease of buying and selling homes would mean HOAs would have an incentive not to be so annoying so as to not encourage people to leave.
I want property values to go down, because that means prices go down. I'd prefer stable, lower prices to these volatile but typically increasing prices.
If you're doing it frequently that becomes much easier.
Great! This is a job creator for home inspectors.
See 3 and 4.
More people able to buy would make this process much easier.
My complaint is not with the experience of bad landlords but with the precarity of not being able to own a home in general. The prevalence of renting out property for profit is the primary factor driving housing prices out of reach.
I don't think it's as easy as you make it out to be, lowering prices won't fix a lot of the issues people run into when buying and selling property, even if it's short term.
I'm not saying the current model doesn't need to change, but moving from one extreme to another is not going to work either. There needs to be flexibility to allow for more/easier property ownership, but buying and selling will never be a minor inconvenience compared to renting. For many reasons, people will continue to rent and would prefer to do so. The market will still need to cater to them too.
Hopefully it goes better than San Diego's attempted crack down...
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/investigations/san-diego-granted-dozens-of-short-term-rental-licenses-it-shouldnt-have/3268209/
I liked the part where they removed access to the phone numbers on the list for "harassment" after phone numbers were what allowed the abuses to be so easily spotted.
I honestly don't know why we can't tax the bejesus out of investment properties and second homes in order to help fund low income housing. This country has a dire shortage of starter homes and the market is clearly not going to provide them on its own.
I would love to see the math on exactly how heavily we would have to tax non-primary residences in order to adequately subsidize the construction of starter homes and high density housing adequate enough to serve the housing needs of the entire country. Who knows? Maybe the inventory really is so low that it wouldn't be enough without something absolutely absurd.