Ask HN: Will this be the end of Airbnb?

I think people have been raising the fundamental moral hazards, lack of business viability and externality problems of gig economy / “marketplace” startups for a long time. But braindead rich people who want to believe in unicorns still pour money into saccharine VC fake shit, giving people of deplorable moral status huge piles of cash, sociopathic ego-stroking soap boxes to stand on, and every incentive to pursue regulatory capture strategies as temporary props to lever up an IPO and foist the inevitable market correction losses onto unwitting regular people who come to own toxic business stocks through dark patterns in their retirement plans with “target date” mixes and automatic adjustments hard to opt out of.

At some level you have to be angry at consumers who use and defend these businesses, and be angry at employees who agree to work for them and smugly believe it’s all untouchable becuz tech.

If you are an engineer for Airbnb, Bird, Uber, Lyft, etc., you are the problem.

You have to be responsible for the business model of the jobs you take. What is the value proposition? Not just internal to the company, but to the external world.

Until rank and file engineers start saying no to these jobs, nothing is going to get better. We have to say no to horrible working conditions like open plan offices, braindead infantilizing office spaces where video games and catered lunches matter more than basic health benefits, severance pay, and work life balance.

It’s not going to get better until we just refuse to participate in these sham businesses and we stop glorifying some manifest destiny founder trope as if it’s worthy of admiration or good for the world.

We operate 2 units out of our home. They were converted from rentals. They were REALLY crappy rentals though and essentially illegal to rent out anymore - lacking access to laundry facilities, kitchens, etc. But they are comfortable and spacious and in a nice part of town, so they have made excellent Airbnbs.

Housing shortages in our area are a huge problem - any apartment complex proposal dies in city hall, so they are essentially banned. The only source of new units are hotels. Our units are slightly more expensive than renting, but still an amazing deal over an equivalent hotel. And a quarter of the cost goes to local taxes (we're taxed at a higher rate than the hotels, btw).

Coronavirus has dropped Airbnb rates across the board - but occupancy has been about the same (market pricing in action). We have noticed a ton more interest in long term rentals (a. because it's so cheap, and b. a lot of people have bizarre living situations right now), so if anything income is a lot more consistent right now.

Airbnb's cut isn't that affected. It's still bizarre how much they make off of a unit considering how little they provide. Their insurance never pays out - their website and app are embarrassingly bad.

Nope, their main money drain is people and people that they don't really need at that.

Does it take the thousands of people they have to support a couple of apps and a website + user support? No.

Leasing property should be out of the hands of regular regular folks because regular folks don't know how to handle it ethically. I define regular folks as pretty much anyone not heavily regulated for ethical performance.

The problem with leasing property is that once you've bought the property to lease, you the landlord (good god the feudal nature of the word itself should be setting off alarm bells) are now in possession of a basic need of humans (shelter) that you can dole out as you please. This property is also fairly easy to manage without it going down in flames so the next step is maximizing your own comfort at the top of your middle-class existence at the cost of some poor other unfortunate. This poor other unfortunate must clamber up to the top of the shit-pile racing against time as you bleed them dry so they too can afford a property to squeeze out the next unfortunate.

It's a pyramid scheme of the worst kind. But its practice is widespread and common enough that we don't bat an eye. And you don't have to look far to see abuses everywhere veiled in legal frameworks. My wife, for example, was recently thrown out of a Scandinavian country because we didn't have a strong enough case for residency. Her landlords were a man and a wife both very well-off living downstairs. We thought it was an amicable living arrangement until, on moving out, they politely informed her she'd be paying two months of rent after her departure to "give them enough time to find a replacement". This was in a city swarming with desperate people willing to kill their pet if it meant they could be move in the same day. My own experiences with landlords in the US have been of the same awful caliber.

We, as human beings, have allowed these abuses because there are no sufficient checks and balances to our own greed. It's all Self-first and damn the others. I feel a kind of hollowness eating me out from the inside every day I get a little older wondering where the Hell we all went wrong.

> Only something that middle class or higher can use

I think it's more nuanced than that. I've stayed in AirBnBs that were clearly being run as a major source of income by people who otherwise didn't have many options for income (remote areas, Native reservations, etc.). I remember staying in a spare structure in the Navajo nation a few years back, it was run by an elderly couple who were looking after their 3 granddaughters and literally had no other way to make income to support themselves or the girls. They said AirBnB and a prepaid cell phone had literally turned around their entire economic situation.

Separately, it has enabled many of my friends who are on the lower end of the economic spectrum to afford to go places with their family as AirBnBs are usually cheaper than hotels and generally larger and often include kitchens (further saving costs eating out while traveling). One of my friends in particular (in his 40s) took his first out-of-state family vacation ever due to this. Before this they never ventured further than a few hours drive from where they lived because they simply couldn't afford it.

I also entirely agree that they need to be better regulated, and that they can have a deleterious effect on local housing prices. Japan seems to have taken some serious steps towards finding a good balance of regulation and availability for these things. On a trip to Japan we stayed in hotels and AirBnBs and in every case the BnBs were cheaper, larger, and generally better than the hotels. However, they're only allowed to use them as short-term rentals for 180 days per year, must be licensed and have other restrictions on when they can be used. [1]

I don't know if Japan's approach is the right one, but the number of AirBnBs available in Japan make me think that it hasn't destroyed the legitimate marketplace for this type of side income (where AirBnB is at its best) while also making it much harder for people to soak up the local rental market as speculators with "accommodations" being used to reduce risk in their investment portfolio.

1 - https://www.asiaone.com/asia/airbnb-says-forced-cancel-booki...