Because often it is a nightmare to evict a tenant that do not pay the rent.
I can speak for where I live where a lot of people gone to the short-rental way exactly because that way they have the certainty that when they want the house back, for every reason, they have it.
To me AirBnB is not the problem, it is the wrong solution to a real problem.
What I do not agree about is the implicit assumption that if AIRBNB is banned then every house that was used for short-term rental would become available on the long-term rental market.
The main advantage of the short-term rental (obvious higher profits aside) is the fact that the owner is sure to be able to get back the house if/when he need it. So many owners saw the possibility to use an house with AirBnB (or other similar ways) a lot more attractive than keeping it empty (paying the taxes on it) and much less risky than having a long-term rental where the tenants could be turn out to be a bad one.
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?!
Hotels were a nightmare, cabs were a nightmare. These companies indisputably changed the game in the favour of the consumer all around the world.
Where we are now having an issue is large swaths of housing taken over by companies and investors wanting a return. As long as housing and renting are attractive for investment over and about housing and transitory renting, it will attract lots of money.
Supply must be improved to improve the housing market. This should be a continuous government function at least at the low and middle income level not just a private endeavour.
Density and public transport is the answer - not killing something that absolutely changed the game and took the hotel and cab market back to their customers begging for a chance.
Sure, but AirBnB and Uber didn't improve the hotel and taxi markets, they just joined them. They each took advantage of a tech debt and then lowered the barriers for entry to the market. In doing so, they made a shit ton of money by carving out market share from the fucked up systems you described.
Also by doing and end run around regulations by pretending to be people just renting their house when they are away or giving rides to people going in the same directions. That is why they have names like 'ride share' instead of 'contracted cabbies who drive their own cars'.
Seriously? Not sure about airbnb since I use booking, but Uber was so much better than cabs it wasn't even close. They didn't even make that much money. They lost money last quarter
What wasn’t a nightmare was bed and breakfasts. They also weren’t an excuse to keep property off the housing rental market at scale.
These companies aren’t saviours, they’re businesses who rode public tech optimism and common frustration at established industries in the same fields to stay ahead of regulation and have the public demand it. Surprise, they’re the same businesses.
The ones I've been to are comparable to a hotel and include a good breakfast. So yeah, a bit more than an Airbnb, but not that far off from Airbnb + good breakfast restaurant.
Yeah, I think the main issue is supply. Airbnb works because of a mix of supply and costs. There just aren't many nice places to stay in resort areas, and the few that exist are extremely expensive (e.g. fancy hotels). Likewise, hotels are often more expensive and less convenient if you have a large group (e.g. my family likes to vacation together, and there's like 20 of us).
The problem seems to be long term residents feeling the pain of increased housing costs. If you legislate against that, those tourists will still need to go somewhere, which means more hotels or more strain on transportation from the outlying areas to the tourist area. If mass transit is effective, that's not a big issue, but far too often that's not the case, so you'll just end up with tons of traffic.
My proposal is to not ban it, but instead limit it to residents, so in order to do short-term rentals, you need to be physically present a majority of the year. Otherwise, you need to apply as a regular rental, which can be limited to certain areas near transit hubs to keep traffic under control. Then improve transit into the area so tourists who don't fit in the city can easily get there.
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.
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.
From what I remember it was supposed to be a simgle use vehicle that they kept using.The CF worked great those few time but would eventually wear out because of stress fractures. That's what I remember from when the accident happened so I could be wrong.
I think "great" carries a sort of connotation as if engineers expect it might work once or twice. From the sounds of it, the better description of the submersible for the surviving trips might be that it worked miraculously. Basically divine intervention that they made it back even once.
I can show anyone that I can successfully apply low grade carbon fiber as flooring material. No matter what grade porcelain you use, you probably wouldn't use it for a submarine, car or plane body. It's all about proper engineering design based on sound science and testing of materials.
Stockton Rush got a bargain on the carbon fiber he bought from Boeing because It was approaching the end of its shelf life and it was no longer acceptable for use in aircraft, let alone submarines.
Rush also made a number of claims about the involvement of Boeing and other companies, claiming they were "involved in both the design and construction" of his submarine. Those claims were not true. Boeing made it clear that they had NO involvement in any part of the sub's design or construction and they had simply sold Rush the carbon fiber.
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