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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

#151

Post by baddox »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #147
baddox wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it.

Perhaps it should be. That certainly doesn't mean that it is. Do the people of Flint want their water crisis?

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

#152

Post by marssaxman »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #147
baddox wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it.

That's awfully idealistic! Sure, it would be nice if that were true, as a pure expression of democracy, but I've never seen a real-world government which actually met that standard.

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

#153

Post by CryptoPunk »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #146
CryptoPunk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Good point. There is a case that house-use restrictions are consistent with voluntaryism given land is not man-made movable property. The community at large could reasonably argue it has a greater right to govern immovable natural property than the first person to homestead it, given the latter is not an act of creation the way the genesis of other types of private property is.

Anyway aside from the larger political question, I think it's more practical to leave these decisions to individual condo associations. No need to homogenize policy in a diverse landscape.

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

#154

Post by CryptoPunk »

codyb wrote: post #145
CryptoPunk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 zo…

It's poor exercise of government power to prohibit a money-making operation, as a way to stop a subset of that money-making operation that has harmful effects. Better to target the harmful activity directly.

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

That's a different topic. My point was that there's no good reason to assume long term residents contribute more to the tax base, given how much more tourists spend per day of occupancy.

But to your point: who said Airbnb means dodging luxury taxes? And why ignore the loss in tourism when you wipe out the low-cost accommodations market provided by home-sharing?

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

Remuneration from paying guests is not the only potential motivation for allowing a large number of people to stay at one's place in quick succession. The motivation should not be relevant if the problem is the quantity of people staying. Targeting remnunerated stays exclusively is biased.

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

#155

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

baddox wrote: post #102
devindotcom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short term stays like hotels and long term stays like renting should be regulated differently, yes? You have different rights as a renter and as a consumer of hotel services. If you claim to be regulated by one (say as a landlord who has several empty units intended for lease) but are operating as the other (essentially an off-books hotel) that is an attempt to manipulate regulators and avoid responsibilities, tax bu…

> Short term stays like hotels and long term stays like renting should be regulated differently, yes? It's clear that a lot of people take this for granted, but I don't. I don't see why the rights of one group ought to be different or more important than the rights of another group.

As a pedestrian, you have the right to transport yourself using the sidewalk; as an automobile driver, you don't.

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

#156

Post by haloux »

l4yao wrote: post #139
dvtrn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand the outcomes of the second scenario. Wouldn't adding housing stock A) make more room for them and B) as a result, lower the cost to stay within the neighborhood Won't their checks be for fair market value of their expropriate property? So by definition, they should be able to relocate within the neighborhood?

>Won't their checks be for fair market value of their expropriate property?

As someone who's been on the short end of eminent domain for a freeway offramp in north LA, nope. The city tends to hire their own appraisers with their own way of looking at things. Considering that most eminent domain cases run through single family housing without existing homebuilder contracts with the city (at this point, we're talking homes before 1980), there are a litany of ways in which a city appraiser can devalue the house. Yes, of course you can hire an appraiser go to bat for you.

The short and sweet of it is that the city can use things like "you never applied for a permit to build this addition" or "your re-roofing was never replaced with high wind resistant (no joke) tar." At this point, we're talking multiple visits from an appraiser (assuming you can find one willing to deal with city bureaucracy), and lawyer fees to handle the entire case.

That doesn't even begin to address the emotional quagmire of the fact that they knocked on _your_ door. You'll probably need to need to talk to a counselor for that one.

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

#157

Post by pertymcpert »

kofejnik wrote: post #142
pertymcpert wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we’re optimizing for the least human suffering.

Communists said that, too.

And what's being done here is the same as communism? And communism has no potential benefits? Why don't you argue based on concrete facts instead of false equivalencies?
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