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SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

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Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#141

Post by lern_too_spel »

l4yao wrote: post #138
sonnyblarney wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little different. Law Enforcement want data from Facebook because it's useful to an investigation. Law Enforcement want data from AirBnB because the act of working with AirBnb is the illegal part. So asking a drug dealer for the name of his distributors seems reasonable to me. Or asking the illegal online betting company the names of those who were placing illegal bets. Though the regulations should hopeful…

Airbnb isn't banned in New York, it can be operated legally. The city is asking for a full list of all operators, including hosts abiding by regulation. If continuing the (poor) Facebook analogy, this is akin to asking for a full list of their users, even the ones abiding by the law.

The city already has the names and addresses of the law abiding ones. They registered with the city.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#142

Post by kofejnik »

pertymcpert wrote: post #135
kofejnik wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communists in Soviet Russia thought this, too. How do you know your reasoning is sound?

Because we’re optimizing for the least human suffering.

Communists said that, too.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#143

Post by CPLX »

dvtrn wrote: post #109
CPLX wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re kidding right? Eminent domain is used daily in the US and around the world. It would literally be impossible to build and maintain a transportation network without it.

Okay but we're talking about razing houses and replacing it not with infrastructure and transportation networks but with more housing in a state with already a quarter of the nation's homeless population. I have so many questions about what happens in that regional development council hypothetical with astronomically high housing prices and homelessness: - Do you play benevolent city planner and let current residents…

> Okay but we're talking about razing houses and replacing it not with infrastructure and transportation networks but with more housing

Who’s talking about that?

All you have to do, literally, is just stop actively preventing people from building apartment buildings. The market will have no trouble taking care of the rest.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#144

Post by imaginenore »

awad wrote: post #114

The city government would like to blame illegal Airbnb rentals for contributing to the housing crisis but at the same time still enforces strict height limits on buildings because NIMBYism. It won't be today, or tomorrow, but eventually SF and the greater Bay Area will no longer be sustainable as the major economic hub it is without some serious change. You can't complain about increasing income inequality and cost o…

I wonder if it's possible to build down instead of up, or is it too expensive to excavate.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#145

Post by codyb »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #133
codyb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's a fairly easy question to answer. The rooted pay taxes, provide stability to a neighborhood, and are invested in the upkeep of their properties. They also tend to be better neighbors than a constant flow of random people who may not care whether they make noise, or disturb others. I certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned thei…

Visitors spend far more per day than long-term residents. I think there's a high likelihood that their overall contribution to the taxbase greatly exceeds the long-term residents per day of occupancy. In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident. As for s…

It wouldn't matter if it was the condo across the hall or the house across the street. Just because you own a piece of property doesn't give you the right to do anything you want with it.

That's why we don't allow strip clubs next to schools. Because certain things should be in certain places and not others.

In this case, the people have stated by voting in representatives who've appointed officials who've created zoning laws that they don't want short term leasing without a permit in their residential neighborhoods.

And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.

Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#146

Post by ilikehurdles »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #133
codyb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's a fairly easy question to answer. The rooted pay taxes, provide stability to a neighborhood, and are invested in the upkeep of their properties. They also tend to be better neighbors than a constant flow of random people who may not care whether they make noise, or disturb others. I certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned thei…

Visitors spend far more per day than long-term residents. I think there's a high likelihood that their overall contribution to the taxbase greatly exceeds the long-term residents per day of occupancy. In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident. As for s…

When you bought a residential property, you agreed to operate it within certain levels of upkeep, within residential zoning ordinances, adhering to a list of rules the city imposes on you. You didn't settle a piece of land on some unclaimed frontier, and you don't get to change the rules your building, neighborhood, community, city, state, or country imposes on your property just because you don't like them. If you wanted to operate a hotel, buy property zoned for that purpose.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#147

Post by ilikehurdles »

baddox wrote: post #95
ilikehurdles wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim. But that’s beside the point, because this is a case about an unlicensed Airbnb. I don’t know what the laws are where you come from, but someone illegally turning their multi-tenant property in a residential neighborhood into a 24-hour motel isn’t someone I have any sympathy for. Besides, Airbnb is no answer to the dearth of housing in…

> Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim. I don't know. Maybe this is just differing philosophies of government, but when I object to the government exercising an authority that only it has, I consider that to be directly a problem with government. Obviously it's useful to look into who else influences the government's decisions, but the direct problem is the exercise of pow…

The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it. Maybe you're the home owner who would love to have your home demolished and replaced with a high rise, but the fact that you can't means your community doesn't want to be subject to that, and they've exercised that will through the legal framework where you, too, have a voice (albeit an outnumbered one). We trade authority to the government for it to stop you with legal means so that your neighbors don't stop you with clubs and pitchforks.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#148

Post by dwild »

exogeny wrote: post #60
nanis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotel owners do not want competition. For a politician, it is easier to extract surplus from a limited number of hotel owners than from a large number of people renting their individual units. So, under the appropriate excuse, a law preventing competition is passed. The foundations of all this were established in the early 20th century in cases such as Nebbia v New York[1], Munn v Illinois[2] etc. For the record, I t…

This is a pretty short-sighted view, in my opinion. Regulation also means working fire alarms, access for disabled persons, and a whole lot of other things that are far from guaranteed with unscrupulous building owners in a booming housing market. The right solution is in the middle somewhere, but it's insufficient to simply call this a case of regulatory oversight.

I think you answered to the wrong comment. He never said all regulations were wrong, he said the monopolistic regulation around hotel and taxi are just made to protect hotel and taxi owners. He isn't talking about any other regulation from what I understands.

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#149

Post by jbob2000 »

md5wasp wrote: post #137
jbob2000 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an article that did the math on the SF housing issue (it’s killing me that I can’t find it, but it was on HN). It’s actually physically impossible to build housing at the rate that SF is growing. Even if you got rid of the politics. Even if there was unlimited land. The issue is that you literally cannot build housing at the skyrocketing rate of growth that SF is experiencing. That’s why this is a crisis, it’s…

This one? http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys...

Yup, that’s the one! Thanks!

Re: SF fines two landords $2.25M for illegal Airbnb rentals

#150

Post by tomc1985 »

kofejnik wrote: post #121
tomc1985 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This city attorney seems... extra. Good. Extra is what you need to stand up to SV clout How do you propose convincing propertyowners to finance their own vertical construction?

why should property owners do that?

Because it's their property
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