Airbnb's impact on cities

Interestingly, I'd agree with you if you'd left airbnb out of that list.

I see something more menacing in airbnb, probably because I've witnessed families getting outbid for single family homes by owners who turn around and airbnb out the "spare" rooms - in a city where I grew up and where the percentage of children has plummeted from about 22% to below 14% in my lifetime (yes, I'm talking about San Francisco).

Airbnb and related services do convert the housing used for children, who don't pay rent and cost a bundle, into short term rentals for tourists. This isn't the only harm it does, but it's the one that worries me the most.

If this isn't true, by all means I'd love to see the data, provided airbnb doesn't scrub it of all evidence first, ahem.

BTW, I like airbnb style rentals fine if they are regulated properly. 75-90 days is a lot of time to get to rent out a house that is zoned for long term residence. If I go off on vacation for a couple of weeks, and I rent my place out, I don't see much harm there. But if a former kid's room is converted into a revolving door for tourists, one more kid is displaced from SF? There is tremendous harm if San Francisco ceases to be a place where people are from.

The problem is that airbnb is lobbying fiercely against meaningful regulation. I'm personally not against zoning to ensure a proper mix of housing in a city. I don't think that these regulations are obsolete just because someone wrote a rails program that allows you to type in your address and click the "Create Hotel Here" button.

Sounds similar to the problem of ticket prices and scalping. It absolutely sucks that families are getting displaced, but at the same time it's a correction in the market.

I'd be curious to know why family residences are more valuable as short-term rentals. My guess would be that there's just more people that want to stay in SF than there are hotels available at prices people want to pay. The tight housing market isn't helping that either. People are getting evicted and replaced by renters willing to pay more, regardless of Airbnb. There's premium on space, short or long term.

Airbnb's not helping, but I think it's more of a symptom of the bay's broken housing market than anything else. I'd wonder if regulating Airbnb rentals wouldn't have a negative effect similar to rent control. My understanding is that most economists agree that price ceilings on real estate only exacerbate the supply problem that places like SF are facing, and the best solution is to build.

On the other hand, why risk the capital to build a hotel, when you can just use the existing housing instead?

There is nothing to imagine, that is how markets operate.

And it is how they have always operated. Hotels and tourist destinations are not built or preserved for your "visit it once and live there 30 years without going again" revenue.

Unsurprisingly, money dictates land allocation. If you have the money to buy land (and in effect, tourists are buying inner city residential through airbnb) you can only resist economic reality so long.

At that - how do you have claim to it being your city? Do you own it? If you own property in it, is someone evicting you from your own home? If you are renting, well, that's not owning. If your neighbors are deciding to sell or rent their homes at lucrative margins to tourists, why do you think you are in the right telling them they cannot do what they want with the property they own?

We changed that one to the original title of the article. Is it misleading or linkbait? Those are the conditions under which it should be changed.

Arguably it is, but then the site is Stallman's, which makes the context of the advocacy unmistakeable. Also the verbal twist of "use, (i.e. be used by)" is marginally gratifying of curiosity in its own right, and not the same thing as the usual clickbait. So IMO that title squeaks by as ok.

Obviously different editors would call some of these differently, but that's not the same thing as arbitrarily changing the rules. The rule is pretty fixed.

It's taking the thread into ideological generalities. Playing the monopoly-of-violence card is just upping the ideological ante in a way that can only polarize the argument, at the same time taking the discussion to so abstract a level that there is little of substance left to say. That combination of escalation and generality is one of the worst thing you can do in discussions like this; it's a kind of trolling whether you mean it to be or not.

Similarly for taking a trope like "the strong exploiting the weak" and applying it to tourists (of all people) in a way that's guaranteed to tick off the readers who go in for that kind of phrase. That's basically just a stunt, and it's one that seems designed to offend. Why do you go out of your way to make the people you disagree with uncomfortable? Again, that's trolling whether you intend it to be or not. (I used to do this myself without realizing it. It took me a long time to see that.)

The kind of discussion we want here is people trying respectfully to figure out the truth together. Your comments frequently strike me as conforming to the letter of that idea while violating its spirit—almost as if you'd discovered a loophole in the rules of discourse and were gleefully exploiting it. That's not as bad as violating the letter outright, which is what most people do who use HN as an ideological battlefield. But it's still dismaying, and it still leaves one with the feeling of being trolled. As, for that matter, do your naive-sounding "how is" questions that always seem to leave the real problem unmentioned.