They didn't accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don't get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn't do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, "fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here." A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It's about as fucked as it can get. And when we've had a sympathetic council person, they're immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It's a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That's no typo; twenty five percent of our valley's residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.
Visiting my husband's home town where this has happened and all his parent's friends have moved into trailers because the houses where they raised their kids were bought for insane amounts but then they couldn't afford a smaller house in the same town. Where we live now on the East Coast, we can no longer stay in our school district for less than half a million because doctors from larger urban areas keep buying the houses in our school district and we're being forced 60+100 miles out from my hometown where we raised our young kids to even begin to afford housing.
My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it's very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we've sent them about a million notices that they're collecting the wrong tax amount and they don't even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won't provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that's an expense that's hard to justify to taxpayers.
We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn't even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn't stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I've seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it's happening.
I'd personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren't also owner-occupied, but I'm not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn't happen. It sucks.
I'm an activist writing a housing bill to get introduced to my state legislature. Part of it specifically addresses these platforms, but I don't know what's been tried against them yet. Any tips?
Unfortunately, I don't know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they've told me, they just don't get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there's nothing about the actual companies.
It's kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn't evenly distributed, so there's not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It's still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I've seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone's actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I'd kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
I'll go one step further, I'd pay taxes to the government that actually regulates shitty business practices. How is it easier to have a 12% increase in homelessness last year than it is to regulate fucking airbnb? Airbnb is not northrup grumman. It's not allied steel. it can go the fuck away.
Oh I 100% agree - when I finally managed to finish my degree a few years ago, I did my capstone research on suburban/rural homelessness, and I'm now an even bigger proponent of housing-first policies. Supportive housing works better than piecemeal programs, and outcomes are better for sobriety and mental health treatment than they are for programs that require those things as a condition of getting housing.
Unfortunately, people fucking love to hate the homeless. Everyone wants to put conditions on every scrap you give them because "I worked for what I have, they should have to, too!" There's not a lot of political support to be found for policies that are based on meeting people where they are. Saying we should use housing that's already vacant to help people get off the streets would get you booed right out of the room a lot of the time.
I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn't necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we'd spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don't like that that's the reality, but I can see why the idea isn't popular.
Also, the police aren't involved in regulating short-term rentals. I'm no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.
Is it not tax evasion/fraud? In the US, either can bring criminal charges. For a smaller municipality, is there no assistance available from higher government?
No clue - most of that is either a department I'm not in and don't know much about, or it's way over my head. I'm just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That's the biggest impediment.
Those are fair points, but I can't help but chuckle that they were brought to justice because they stole from millionaires and other billionaires to make their ill gotten gains. Probably woulda got away with it if they just stole from the poor and middle class.
They are a company with zero morals and the goal to maximize profits. That's what capitalism is for and were it's good at.
The government needs to create rules and laws to make sure that this profit maximizing doesn't happen on the back of ordinary people, but since corporate america is allowed to control the government through money, this doesn't happen.
Capitalism is a tool, can we please start to use it like that again?!
In retrospect, I think the marketing/sales/finance corporate leadership idiocy that’s intensified over the last couple decades is the single biggest contributor to my deep sense of frustration and ennui I’ve developed working as a software engineer. It just seems like pretty much fucking nobody in the engineering management sphere these days actually values robust, carefully and thoughtfully designed stuff anymore - or more accurately, if they do, the higher-ups will fire them for not churning out half-finished bullshit.
That's why I like my steam deck so much: the design is so thoughtful and adapted to its own needs, and unfortunately that's a rare sight lately (not just in technology).
I bought the LCD without and later switched to oled with.
Honestly. I barely notice it. Go for the cheapest oled option. That is a change you will notice, unlike the the etching.
Just to add on to what others have already said, you can get an anti-reflective screen protector to accomplish the same task. If you think you'll be playing in environments with a lot of light, then I'd spring for it.
Would've probably turned out different if Valve was beholden to shareholders and the never-ending hunger for a higher stock price. The push to drive "shareholder value" is one of the most destructive forces if not the most destructive force we're dealing with these days.
US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.
This is happening worldwide. It has very little to do with urban planning and more with lax homeownership restrictions that allows the wealthy and corporations to scoop up housing supply for profit.
"The wealthy and corporations" have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they'll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain't nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).
There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.
(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.
I'll agree that there is indeed a housing shortage, but I don't necessarily think that is what's at play here. Capitalists will always park their money when they see an opportunity to make a return, regardless of industry. Housing has never really been an elastic commodity, it is inelastic in nature due to the time it takes to build and the fact that it is a reasonably sizable asset that doesn't change hands at the drop of a hat (granted there are market products that contradict this, but I'm going to ignore them for the sake of this conversation). Further, they have always been marketed as an investment vehicle, albeit a long term one.
And while there is plenty of land in the US to build on, housing is only as attractive as it's local market. Plenty of communities have popped up via ambitious developers, but fall on their faces when the demand is inexistent (California City being a famous example). Better transit options can alleviate this, but people are still drawn to geographic proximity to jobs, schools, entertainment, etc.
Homes in high demand areas fetch a premium because people want to live where they work and play without the commute. These areas are already well developed, and yes had their been more relaxed zoning laws, more housing stock could have been built. But, I would argue that many communities built 50+ years ago were built with the then current demand in mind, not the demand of today. Sure that could be pinned on developers and city authorities not having enough foresight, but I don't really blame them for not being able to comprehend both prospects of an exploding population and the demand these cities currently see.
Short term rentals are tricky because no one is going to vacation to a suburb 30-45 min from an urban center or destination location, they want to be in the heart of the action. These properties present an ideal investment opportunity for these operators in that a) they purchase an appreciating asset, and b) they generate a short term return. It's almost a guaranteed profit for them.
Cities saw this problem growing, and should have taken preemptive action. Yet they ignored it because they were listening to moneyed interests. Now that it's become a full epidemic, it'll be much harder to contain.
Soil consumption is one of the many environmental problems we face. Polluting and consuming more soil to condition the market is nonsense IMHO.
Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents. This also addresses the issue of locals being pushed further and further away in the cities they live, which creating more houses doesn't solve (it will just be the next round of isolated dormitory periferic areas, which have already tons of problems).
Short term rentals for houses was a very good and lucrative idea, but it's harmful to basically everyone but the landlords who rent out houses there. As such, we should simply strongly regulate it to discourage it as much as possible, if not banning it directly.
Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents
Berlin did exactly that: You can rent out your apartment for IIRC 30 days a year, or while you're also living there, if you want to rent out more you need a hotel license and tough luck getting one while there's a housing shortage, least of all for a flat in a residential area.
But OTOH that's all only taking the edge off there's been decades of under-investment in social housing in Germany overall, and the little social housing that got built got built via attaching conditions to building permits for private investors, those apartments lose their social housing status after 20 or such years.
And it's not like there aren't companies who want to build, and build plenty -- but they don't because they can't recoup costs, not in this market where every rich fuck who can afford rent already is living somewhere else: Building costs are too high. Some of that is building standards, permitting, etc, but the bulk of it is financing costs, that is, interest on loans for new construction is way too high. Getting at land is not always easy but there's plenty of mechanisms such as municipalities having right of first refusal for any land sale (if they want to, that's another topic). There's really only one way out of this and it's state coffers because the capital market certainly isn't going to get less greedy.
Agree. Social housing has been one of the first areas to suffer from cuts everywhere.
It is a problem on its own, which short term rental makes worse.
The problem is that building is basically an irreversible use of land. It's only recently that we started seeing land as a commodity (few centuries) and with the current state of affairs, it's insane to leave it as such. Soil is too precious and too scarce to let market inefficiencies waste it. We should really explore all options before we decide to simply build more, especially in Europe where the population growth is basically null.
The build more thing is in urban areas to accommodate urbanisation. Coming to think of it the 49 Euro ticket might actually reverse some of that because there's tons of smaller towns, sometimes villages, with proper train connection to the next large city. Low prices drive usage which prompts higher train frequencies which, infrastructure permitting, takes even more pressure off the metropolitan housing market.
That said urbanisation isn't in itself a bad thing -- it makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons to not have a gazillion tiny villages, it'd just be another form of sprawl. Here in SH, if every train station we do have had a small urban core around it surrounded by village structures in cargo bike distance and then long stretches of fields and nothing, that'd actually be quite nice. The state was very good at doing that in the Hamburg metropolitan area, focussing development on a couple of axes radiating out from Hamburg but it should become more of a general pattern.
But it takes ages to build houses. You're again blaming something that's a given just to ignore that housing is a basic need. Obviously if the basic need is manipulated there's loads of money to be made.
Singapore actually has housing pretty much nailed down. If Singapore had US-style housing policies 95% of Singaporeans would live in Malaysia and commute because only bank execs etc. could afford living in the city.
...also Singapore would have zero green space left. It'd all be single family homes interspersed by parking lots. You can't spit out a chewing gum over there without hitting a public park.
There's exceptions for therapeutic uses (dental, nicotine gum) and you can also import small amounts for personal use. Chewing is perfectly legal, improper disposal isn't.
Once a house is there it is there. You dont just demolish it, and build it up again somewhere else.
The only thing that can be elastic is demand. And it is not because moving has high opportunity costs, people are socially integrated in the area they life, feeling at home is a crucial feeling for mental well being...
People renting/buying to life are at a fundamental disadvantage against landlords, who only care about the money coming in. Thinking of housing as a "normal" market like idk. headphones or something shows a lack of economic understanding.
Air BnB effectively pitted average renters and homeowners against the luxury hotel market. From a supply/demand standpoint its basically moving something like 10% of the rental market to the hotel market.
What this does is it means luxury long term rentals slot out the next lower tier of housing at higher pricing it slides down the economic ladder until a percent of people at the bottom is simply outbid for the reduced normal rental housing stock.
Its not airbnb's fault the market shifted but it is a problem with the market as a result of blending the luxury hotel market with residential housing.
Southerner here. FYI, kudzu is nowhere near as bad as this big tech shit. It doesn't actually engulf entire forests; it just looks like it does because it covers the edges of them and that's mostly the part that people see.
It’s so frustratingly close to perfect too. It has a great screen, is more than powerful enough for all my dev work, it’s super portable, I can plug it into a monitor via alt mode, my Bluetooth keyboard works great on it…
It is like right there to being my favorite device, but the crappy mobile OS relegates it to sitting unused on my desk 85% of the time.
Really the only thing I use it for is CAD work via Shapr3D.
That's the issue. That might be fine for you, but for others we would like it to be. The limitation isn't hardware, so let the users decide whether they want it to be more than a big iPhone.
I did hit enter, but only once. Markdown needed 2 enters to not carry to the next return, at least in this app (thunder). I added a second return and it should display correctly now.
Both 87 grade gasoline and typical red wine contains about 10% in ethanol. The limitation isn’t the ethanol. Let the users decide whether they want to consume it…? No! Just like the gasoline refineries did not make it with intention for human consumption, Apple designed the iPad hardware for a different use case than what you’d like.
Just like how the gas station attendant will tell you that you cannot consume gasoline at the gas station, Apple will tell you that you cannot run macOS at the Apple Store. If someone wishes to attempt it, there’s nothing preventing them from buying gasoline, taking it home, and attempt to consume it in their home. If someone wishes to attempt running macOS, there’s nothing preventing you from buying it, taking it home, and attempt to hack macOS onto it.
Gasoline isn’t the product for someone wanting to get drunk; just like how the iPad is not a product for you because it doesn’t fit your use case, and that’s fine. You can always wait for when they inevitably release the M4 variant of MacBook (or MacBook Air if weight is a concern), which will fit your use case better.
You just happen to be conflating hard limitations of a physical substance with arbitrary soft limitations. Of course you cant replace chips with sand despite both having a % of silicon. Those are entirely different things.
Wine and gasoline aren't the same thing at all, they just happen to have one common element in their composition.
The iPad and a computer ARE the same thing. The label is something the brand puts on, it is not an hard limitation of the universe.
I personally don't care if IKEA says that their bedroom furniture is for the bedroom. If I decide to use it as living room furniture I can and IKEA should not have a say, however they probably would if they could.
Brands like to have that weird control when they can, generally not in worries we're doing something weird with stuff but for some strategic benefit, such as not cannibalising sales of something else.
If IKEA could bind pieces of furniture to types of room, you'd be more likely to have to buy more furniture over your lifetime. It would also maybe prevent them from having to comply with some regulation with the "our furniture is not furniture, is an... habitational support"! argument.
There is no “hard” limitation differentiating guzzling down a gallon of gasoline vs a gallon of red wine; nor is there any “soft” limitation of deploying your own OS.
Vast majority of people do not possess knowledge to extract consumable ethanol from gasoline, doesn’t mean it is impossible.
Vast majority of people do not possess knowledge to attempt to deploy their own OS onto an iPad, doesn’t mean it is impossible. Very talented individuals have been hacking iOS boot loader since original iPhone (no version, no suffix) days.
If one are so inclined, there’s plenty of places to learn, and expand one’s knowledge to attempt what most aren’t able to do. The alternative? Bitch whine complain and repeat until a multi-trillion company give a damn. I ain’t holding my breath.
This is a stupid light take, starting with the flowery version of their early 2010-ish "good intentions".
Their "guarantee" insurance was notoriously difficult to actually access if needed. This was typical enshitification from the start, they just had to do a bit more early to gain public trust, until they reached critical mass and then flipped the switch.
The drug dealer gives you the first baggie for free, not because they are good dudes that care about you saving money...
Not an urban legend, just not in your first hand POV - Many examples around crack in the 80s, Molly at raves, a bump of coke at a party... All followed by, "and hey man, if you ever want more, hit me up"
When you're making definitive statements try to add "doesn't happen TO ME...." or "IMO/IME", otherwise you just sound like you base the truth of the entire world solely on your own hyper limited, lived experience.
Having some free drugs at a party isn't the same thing as "the first baggie being free".
I would be very surprised if you could just walk up to drug dealers on the street and get free drugs like the urban / astroturf / DARE / LEO myth suggests.
Or maybe it has happened to me a dozen times but I'd shout, "No way man! Drugs are for losers!" And hand him a DARE pamphlet and then I gained a reputation.
I actually was talking to a neighbor at my apartments 20 some-odd years ago. We got to talking about coke and he asked if I'd ever smoked it before.
"No..." So I followed him across the hall to his apartment and took a hit. "Whoa, this is fucking great! ...Wait, when you smoke it isn't it crack?"
"Yeah, it's awesome isn't it!? You know, if you want more I can probably find some..."
So, yup. I got my first hit of crack for free. I never thought that happened in real life before, either, and I've never had or heard of it happening since. Additionally, about six months later I stopped smoking crack.
No, low quality carbon fiber didn’t lead to the accident. A blatant disregard for safety, testing, and best practices led to the accident. Low quality carbon fiber just contributed a bit.
I have seen it on screen only. Fortunately, I live in a country where such tinkerboxes are illegal on public roads (except when you go ahead on foot and pull the thing on a string behind you).
I can't believe people trust others enough to rent their house out like a hotel. I've already seen so many problems from this I can't believe it's still legal. My neighbor moved and they turned it into an AirBnB, some kids threw a party and left some trash out that poisoned my other neighbors dog. There's a lawsuit, but the dog is still fucking dead.
I don't know if I've ever been in an airbnb that's actually somebody's house. It seems like they're mostly "investment properties" that people rent out. I'm sure that's great for housing. \s
It started this way tho, people renting a room or a couch in their home. Pretty quickly it became either full units or rooms in a share appartement with other AirBnB guests.
There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.
When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don't actually want to give away.
I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I'm now on the side of "Airbnb is evil".
A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn't give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they've failed to step in and assist in any way.
Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don't suffer from.
So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.
This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.
Yeah, but on the same token you don't want to give hotels the monopoly.. There is so much price gouging if they know some big event is happening in town. Plus many areas have fuck all for hotel capacity. I do AirBNB because I don't have $150 every time I want to go to a city. I wish we'd have capsule hotels
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