this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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I'm just here to say fuck air bnb. Ban that shit for it's contribution to the housing crisis.
In my neighborhood, half the houses are AirBnBs... Because we're close to tourist destinations. 4 of my 5 neighbors are AirBnBs.
How do you even combat that ?
Enforce zoning regulations and apply rental laws or hotel regulations to Air BnBs. If you make them actually follow the rules, it suddenly becomes vastly less profitable.
Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it's so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they're non-specific about the unit you get, so it's very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.
Like any business, they should be subject to audit and inspection at any time.
In my small touristy town the people in charge of the town are all in on the rental property game so they push hard against new policies about zoning and hotel regulations on homes. My uncle is doing it and I know if he was audited be fucked seven ways to Sunday.
See, this is why we need to divert over-bloated policing budgets to proper civil servants.
Just rely on neighbors to report it
The community must pass laws to protect occupancy expectations.
I hate all the "fuck Airbnb" hate when it isn't coupled with "fuck my local council, etc" because they are the real enemy, they and their buddies are all in cahoots
Eliminate zoning and other regulations that make it impossible to build sufficient housing supply.
...Or actually enforce zoning and regulations that ban short term rentals in residential areas? Most Air B&B's in America are already illegal, real estate interests just have a ton of sway in local governments.
Why would you want to ban short term rentals when you could instead build more housing supply? Short term rentals bring in tons of money not only to property owners, but to the local area at large. Housing isn't a zero sum game where in order to have short term rentals, long term rental supply must go down. Zoning laws make it impossible to build high density housing and approvals for large building projects are subject to the whims of the local planning board or city council rather than concrete laws and requirements. If we were to fix zoning regulations and improve approval processes, you could have plenty of housing supply for both short term rentals and long term, and the community would be better off.
Because while you wait for housing to be built there is currently a housing shortage, and existing houses are being used as short term rentals. And you're assuming developers will act in good faith and not just use multiple floors as short term rentals which already happens. I'm all for building more housing and saying fuck short term Air B&B's. There's no reason we can't do both.
I live in a place that is plagued by short term rentals. It sucks for the neighbors to have a different bachelorette parties next door every week of the summer. Lime scooters get littered all over the sidewalks in front of said houses. And we've already voted to ban them in residential areas but there is 0 enforcement.
I'm not assuming anyone will act in good faith. Developers should build whatever is profitable. If they build a whole building of new short term rentals, that will increase the amount of existing units that become available to long term rentals. It seems like you just don't like tourism in your area.
At it's core, this is the root cause of the housing crisis. We do not have enough supply. The amount of Airbnb's that exist is extremely miniscule and the targeting of Airbnbs is an intentional distraction tactic.
Depending on the source, 1% to 0.2% of all dwellings are listed for short-term rental in the US. That's crazy small and has very little impact on housing prices overall.
The fact of the matter is that Single Family Homes are an incredible luxury that our parents and grandparents were able to enjoy when the country had half as many people as it does now. It is no longer sustainable to expect a SFH in the US, and the American public continuing to cling to that dream and restrictive zoning practices are really what is driving up prices.
If you want an affordable house you will need to move to a rural area where land and labor are cheap. If you want to live near any reasonably sized city, you better be upper middle class to even think about buying a SFH.
I totally agree. More housing would be built if we were to just fix our broken zoning regulations and building approval processes but everyone is obsessed with banning Airbnb.
That is a cool handle sir
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The housing crisis is caused by property taxes being too low, particularly on land values. Banning small rentals won't work because they'll continue to extract rent under longer-term leases.
We already have plenty of houses. Increase taxes and their market values will drop.
The housing crisis is caused by many things.
Ban the ownership of single family residential properties by corporations. I don't see a world where it makes sense for houses to be owned by companies.
This is a big one, and I'd add in an aggressive tax for owning multiple properties. Make single land ownership ~70% of what it currently is, and each additional property increases all your property tax by 300%. Couple that with getting rid of idiotic exemptions (seriously...I have a friend with parents that owned more than a hundred different properties in a semi-rural area [one that was going to become suburban soon] and paid nearly no taxes because they plunked a few cows onto each one until the development companies paid the big moolah for them) and there would be plenty of homes for everyone. Last report I remember said we had more than enough empty homes sitting around to house every homeless person multiple times over.
What would you say the housing crisis is? I'm viewing it not as a shortage, just that that market prices are too high.
Not that I strongly disagree with your suggestion, but taxes that raise money have an advantage over bans that cost money.
I think it depends on the area. Some places near me have very limited rentals available yet if you search airbnb in those areas they have way more. Airbnbs for a house can charge what a weeks rent is per night. The owner only needs to have people in the house for 2 months to make the same they would renting it out. When i first moved out of home rent prices jumped 50-100% in 2 years. I'm not sure what caused it but since then rents haven't jump as much but are still very high. Rent used to be maybe 30% at most of wages now its 60%+. Of course theres more factors involved than just the landlords but airbnbs have helped pump rent prices up due to lack of supply. My single mother working part time was able to buy a house when I was younger, now dual income families can't afford that. Some people out there don't work and get money solely from owning houses and renting them out, decreasing supply for other people, increasing prices. The housing crisis, which is worldwide, is a multi-faceted issue which can be (over)simplified and explained by one word. Greed.
Many leading economist argue for land value tax only as a way to incentivize the most efficient use for our most valuable resource. If land tax was used instead of property tax, a multi-acre plot in a dense urban would be taxed just as much a multi-story apartment building that takes up the same amount of space.
See the Strongtowns article on the subject. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/8/if-the-land-tax-is-such-a-good-idea-why-isnt-it-being-implemented