Airbnb Stay Illegal In New York City, Rules Judge

I've lived in NYC for over 15 years, and as a resident, AirBnB is definitely a net negative for me and others in my cohort--full time residents.<p>1. Who wants transients moving about your building? I'm sure most of them are nice, but they are certainly not as invested in exhibiting neighborly behavior as full time residents.<p>2. If AirBnB became a serious economic force in NYC, it would only make my outrageously expensive city more expensive as apartment rents converged upwards towards hotel rates.<p>3. If I knew a neighbor was doing very short term sublets via AirBnB, or a similar service, I would definitely report them to the building management company or Police.<p>4. People need to think carefully about the "sharing economy." Not all applications of this paradigm are a net positive, and despite the hacker ethos not all laws are meant to broken. Many laws that have the effect of protecting entrenched players (hotels in this case), also serve valuable consumer protection functions.

I visited NYC a few months ago and met someone who just moved to Manhattan from Boston. I asked about how she found a place to live and she said it was the worst experience she's ever had. She said that it was impossible to find apartments for rent online, so she was basically forced to walk around the neighborhoods knocking on doors to find an apartment. Half the apartments said they were full, and the other half wouldn't even let her in the lobby.<p>She ended up biting the bullet and hiring an apartment hunter. All of a sudden a ton of apartments had rooms available, including some of the apartments who told her they were full or didn't let her in the lobby.<p>That told me there is a ton of politics involved in the leasing market in NYC. It doesn't surprise me at all they don't like things like Airbnb.

"According to CNET, the law originally meant to prevent landlords from turning residential properties into hotels."<p>Which is what AirBnB is essentially?

It seems that many people are against AirBnB in their neighbourhood because they they don't like strangers there all the time, it's not pleasant, nothing happened yet but it might... stuff like that.<p>I understand those concerns but I think people who think AirBnB should be illegal because of that are forgetting something. People benefit from being tolerant to each other.<p>Everybody is sometimes doing something that is not pleasant to others. If you are trying to be ok with that unless they are doing something really damaging, they might cut you some slack when you need it - and you _are_ going to need it and when you do, you might _really_ need it. Social pressure is usually enough and people mostly avoid doing things unpleasant to others unless it's somehow justified or considered necessary.<p>Otherwise you are going to live in an over-regulated society where everything that can be unpleasant to somebody is illegal, you need a permit for simplest things like throwing your kid a birthday party and everybody is worse off.

I live in a postgraduate student residence that we are only allowed to sublet to alumni and friends/family of residents.<p>Accepting that people have a need to sublet avoiding the cost of a empty room is combined with the community's need not to have weirdo's. Despite being in the center of London, it is like a small village.<p>What hasn't been included so far is the need for a airbnb host to include his community needs which is presumably where the law is coming from.

I would like to know if AirBnB is covering the $2,400 assessed penalty on behalf of Nigel Warren.<p>I am also curious about the immediate steps AirBnB is taking to address this, not the long term lobbying effort mentioned at the end of the article. For example, will AirBnB disallow NYC listings under 29 days until this is resolved? Or will they let people roll the dice with disclaimers that such rentals may violate local law and result court assessed fines.<p>As naive as this may sound, especially for a company that is likely already valued over $1 billion, this is a golden opportunity for AirBnB to gain unparallelled media and bolster main stream support.

I'm a New Yorker here and plain and simple, we don't want AirBnB. This is New York City and the residents of this city have time and time again voiced their displeasure towards AirBnB, so why are people from elsewhere saying this is a bad thing?<p>The shoe just doesn't fit here.

Title is very misleading, as this only applies to New York City, and not the other 57 counties!

This is unhappy news. I was hoping to visit NYC later this year and, for the price of a pretty underwhelming hotel room, there were hundreds of apartments in interesting suburbs.<p>Oh well. At least San Francisco is still OK.

I've used Airbnb to stay in Manhattan last winter and it's a shame that it comes to this since I was planning to use it again.<p>The thing that made us use airbnb was two folds: Having a kitchen was important to us (quick breakfast eating whatever we want) and also the feeling of "living in the Big Apple".<p>Second part would have been impossible with hotels. Sad really.<p>As for some rants about AirBnber's "not being as invested in exhibiting neighborly behavior".<p>The same could be said about other cultures moving in your neighborhood.

Laws are needed to prevent people being ripped off and generally taken advantage of. What this law from the past fails to cater for is that bad comments on AirBnB could well be as effective at safeguarding others against sub-standard rooms as the original law could ever be. Or much better and that must be a scary thought for legislators.

My roommate and I ruled out moving to NYC about a month ago when we started reading about NY and NYC government.<p>I was going to visit for a few months at my roommate's insistence. According to this, it's legal as long as I rent for at least a month, but I'm becoming less and less inclined to visit at all.

Highly illegal in Sweden as well.

Does this have practical consequences and if so, when? Because right now, I can still find plenty of appartments in NYC.

Considering that there are tens of thousands of people kept captive as sex workers in NYC, the decision to crack down on something like airbnb illustrates the strength of the corruption used to maintain the status quo.<p>These kinds of conservative (status-quo preserving) laws are usually exactly that, even if there is some social or humanitarian justification made for their existence.