How have we gotten this far into the comments without anyone mentioning the root cause here is a general shortage of housing in places people want to live / work / visit?<p>It seems to me that AirBNB isn't to blame for the overall lack of housing (and temporary housing aka hostel/hotel) options, rather it's just the most visible brand name competing for the limited supply.<p>Cities can ban it if they want, but I'd rather they focused on allowing more housing to be built.
I live next door to an AirBnB, in a building where maybe 1/5 of the flats have been converted to tourist flats. When I moved in 3 years ago there were zero.<p>I'm woken up by screaming drunk tourists as they come home at 3am on a Tuesday night. There are constantly people clattering suitcases up the stairs at all hours. People smoke inside the common areas instead of on the street. Of course, just generally feeling like you live in an illegal hotel is horrible. We're looking to move.<p>Then again, I have reservations for two AirBnBs next week on holiday in another part of the country. The difference is we have booked entire houses in the countryside, not city-centre flats. AirBnB is not inherently evil, but strict and enforced controls are definitely necessary in cities.<p>I love AirBnB as a customer, but hate it as a resident.
To put it bluntly, I don't like competing with the entire rest of the world for housing in my city, and I'm pretty sure most other people don't either.
I still use airbnb when travelling because it's convenient but when I'm not travelling I can't stand it at all. (I do realize that I'm contributing to the issue by being a customer myself.)<p>Airbnb is probably one of the worst things that has happened to many places that were already tourism heavy. The bit of regulation that made stuff work somewhat was completely subverted by it and because of how quickly it became popular it's now almost impossible to put the genie back into the bottle as there are too many vested interests now.<p>Overall I can't get rid of the feeling that Airbnb is here to stay and it permanently made the world a worse place.
It seems like there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground here — where households have the flexibility to rent out part of their primary residence, on a limited basis (either temporal or just part of the house), subject to clear and evenly enforced regulations. This is a pre-internet idea (e.g., casas particulares in Cuba in the 1990s) that becomes way easier/safer/better with a web-based platform. Personally, I find it massively more fun to stay in a typical home in a region that I'm visiting, and I can often find these on AirBnB.<p>Of course AirBnB is going to try to grow as much as possible to try to eat hotel revenues and develop new markets. But shouldn't communities have the right to combat the externalities that such growth entails?
Here is where the rubber of “corporate responsibility” meets the road. So far AB&B has looked askance to the issues they bring to the table and have only taken token steps to mitigate what they have wrought on communities. They talk the talk all day long about inclusivity, implicit bias and any other terms du jour to shirk from confronting the gigantic mastodon in the room —the one sided effects their services have on lower and middle income shoppers of housing. Yet, where it matters, they fail to walk the walk.<p>Their inaction and continued ignorance of these issues does magnitudes more harm than their progressive efforts in their corp HQ which benefits very few people in comparison.
Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose.<p>Two of my coworkers are currently being forced to look for a new place to live in a tight housing market because their current landlord can make more money renting on Airbnb.<p>I've stayed in Airbnbs in the past (and appreciated the convenience), but I no longer will.
One impact of AirBnb is that it lowers the threshold for traveler affordability. Couple it with discount air carriers such as RyanAir or Southwest and the number of humans who can afford to travel increases dramatically.<p>For example, a quick survey of Chicago shows:<p>On TripAdvisor: 8 hotels with rooms under $100/night. Lowest room $79.<p>On AirBnb: 100+ listings, entire place, under $100/night. Many under $50.<p>In this way, AirBnb is an enabler for travel.<p>Moreover, you don't even need to look at discount airlines. British Air had a round trip from San Francisco to Milan for $650. AirBnb in Milan, entire apartment, start at around $30/night. Suddenly, 10 days in Milan can be had for under $1,500.<p>Economists might see the future for this situation: More air travel leads to cheaper fares. Cheaper fares leads to still more travelers. More travelers on cheap fares means more demand for AirBnb style housing. AirBnb prices get some upward pressure from added demand, bringing more units into the market. More landlords convert from long to short-term rental. Fewer long term rental means lower supply of long term and higher rents. Higher rents mean more people choose to buy, increasing demand for owned homes.<p>What it all adds up to: Without increasing the number of humans on the planet, you've increased housing prices by making travel more affordable.<p>/s Maybe we make the following rule: In order to rent an AirBnb, you have to AirBnb your home while you're gone. s/
AirBNB restrictions should be based on housing vacancy rates. In areas where either through poor zoning or historical preservation there is a restricted supply of housing AirBNB should be strictly limited.<p>However, if vacancy rates are high enough AirBNB acts as a nice pressure valve distributing residential and vacation occupancy without the expense of having to overbuild hotels.
Rather than blaming the company Airbnb for a city’s ills, it may be more helpful to examine why it has popular support in the first place, while family-only zoning is declining in popularity. Short-term rentals in residences were already illegal in San Francisco and New York; they were <i>legalized</i> to allow Airbnb because short-term rentals have popular support from voters. Single-family zoning was designed 100 years ago to create neighborhoods of families who were protected from the nuisances of the lower-class apartment “parasite”s (Euclid v. Ambler) and lower-class houses that were used to raise chickens and take on boarders (<a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-boarding-house/6236/" rel="nofollow">https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-bo...</a> or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermines-Ownership/dp/1937184889" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...</a>). I think exclusionary zoning has been so extreme in some cities that it is beginning to lose its support among the middle class, for whom it is now more necessary to use their property as a business rather than only as consumption.<p>Edit: Related point: In some places, it is ingrained in our culture since the 1970s that housing should be a good investment. Low property taxes (Proposition 13) and zoning restrictions are designed to increase the private gains to this investment (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Government-Taxation/dp/0674015959" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Govern...</a>). A small change of use to short-term rentals is perhaps the next incremental step for house investors. It sucks for people who want to use housing as only a peaceful consumption good, but in my opinion that ship sailed a long time ago in Closed-Access cities.
> My research has found as many as 90% of Airbnb guests have said they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their stays.<p>For a perspective on the other 10%... checkout:<p><a href="https://airbnbhell.com" rel="nofollow">https://airbnbhell.com</a>
Maybe locals would be more supportive of Airbnb if cities made deals with other cities saying 'your residents can stay in our units on a short term basis if ours can stay in yours'.<p>People from boring/small towns and cities would be left out of this though, since their demand to visit tourist destinations would exceed the outside demand to visit their area.<p>The result would be the residents of larger/more-attractive cities, who are free to stay in other major cities, seeing their advantage over the rest of the population grow, which in turn could lead to more people choosing to move to these cities.
I agree that AirBNB is enabling (and profiting from) this behaviour but what is essentially happening is people using AirBNB to turn on their own neighbours.<p>Have there been any government initiatives to educate AirBNB hosts about the impact of their actions?
The apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver is presently sub 1%.<p>People are illegally renting suites as Airbnb, taking up domestic housing stock.<p>It's illegal to rent suites for less than 31 days and without a business licence here, but they do it anyways.