91–100 of 362 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a corporate owned mini-hotel? I am a fairly frequent Airbnb consumer and I have yet to stay somewhere that wasn't mom and pop.
There are a few mini-hotels - properties with more than one room. How many are corporate owned is undetermined. This guy is just bitter about something, perhaps rightfully so. Or maybe just vote manipulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how it drives rent up. If entire apartments are made into AirBnbs, there's less apartments in the market which turns the prices up, what's so hard to grasp ?
And if Hotels close down due to AirBNBs there's more space for appartments where there once were hotels. If the AirBNBs take less space than the hotel they replace it's a win for appartments. If they cause more tourism it's a loss. What the overall effect is is far from clear, I haven't seen any thorough analysis on that. It's naive to only look at one factor and ignore the others, yet that's often how far this debat…
It seems very unlikely AirBnBs will "take less space" than a hotel. Hotels are quite space-efficient, given they're largely small, single rooms.
I find it really unfortunate that the airbnb debate is always so polarized. AirBNB has often provided me a better alternative to a largely terrible hotel market that often takes racket prices and makes me pay for services I don't need. On the other hand I completely understand when people are annoyed about party folk living in the flat above them or when they lack safety regulations or don't pay the same taxes hotels…
It's simply that they don't.
In much the same way that Uber skirts the laws of background checks, Airbnb responds to complaints and attempts to introduce regulation with lawsuits. I wish the Hotel and Cab markets were disrupted by companies that wanted to optimize within the rules of the game, but they, either through lawsuits or just ignoring laws, don't play in an even setting, these traditional companies end up being burdened with more regulations than the "disrupters" adhere to.
AirBnb is a terrible, terrible company. Most of their money comes from corporate-owned mini-hotels yet they advertise as a mom and pop shop. At every turn their solution is to sue small towns and cities so they can continue to extract wealth from our neighborhoods. Disgusting.
There are not many "corporate-owned mini-hotels" but there are certainly hundreds of thousands of people that buy one or more apartments with the purpose of renting them out through AirBnB (or not sell apartments that they would otherwise have gotten rid off). AirBnB doesn't make the little guy make a few extra bucks renting out a room as much as it makes those who already have money buy up studios and one bedroom ap…
AirBnb is a terrible, terrible company. Most of their money comes from corporate-owned mini-hotels yet they advertise as a mom and pop shop. At every turn their solution is to sue small towns and cities so they can continue to extract wealth from our neighborhoods. Disgusting.
But, again, I don't have a horse in this race.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, let's force community residents to deal with noise and parties and the increased cost of housing brought by AirBnb while allowing AirBnb and their billionaire investors to make a lot of money while pushing off all the externalities on the communities.
Oh, so you're in favor of housing segregation by the government?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guests may have loved it, but did the neighbors love it? Did the people looking for long-term rental housing who found it difficult to find long-term rentals love it? Did the people looking to get into home-ownership only to find that residential real-estate prices were increasing now that residential properties were semi-commercial properties love it?
> Did the people looking for long-term rental housing who found it difficult to find long-term rentals love it? This is just passing the buck. If AirBnB is driving up rents you have a supply problem, not an AirBnB problem.
Do you know the cost of destroying + rebuilding bigger buildings in a city center ? Much higher than closing a few semi legal "airbnb hotels". And that's if you can even build in the city at all.
I lived a few doors down to someone who basically ran an ad hoc AirBnB ... before Airbnb. It was pretty terrible. Parties all the time, trash, they parked anywhere (in other people's driveways...) because there were likely no long term consequences for doing so, the folks staying there didn't care because why should they? I was on the association board, it's kinda thankless job as we had to deal with this house. We g…
As you say the laws to destroy them already exist, all it takes is the effort to use it.
Just look at the havoc being reigned on some neighborhoods in Miami Beach during spring break. Specifically the low-scale, residential flamingo park neighborhood of south beach.
I moved there 9 years ago and have spent the last 8 years living on Ocean Drive in South Beach. When I first moved there the neighborhood was full of high-class tourists, a lot of Europeans. The beach was not extremely crowded, you had nice restaurants and upscale shops and the vibes you were getting were similar to what you would see in the Mediterranean (Spain / south France).
Within 3 years of Airbnb expanding, the character of the neighborhood changed completely. By 2014, a lot of restaurants and shops had closed down, to be replaced by 5 dollar souvenir shops (surf style!), kebab and pizza places. Noise levels increased dramatically. Crime too. This kept getting worse and today I would describe the place as little more than a crime-ridden hood. The ghetto criminal element is numerous and ever present. The classy European tourists have left, never to return. Ocean Drive is barricaded by tons of police every weekend (soon to be every night). The beach itself is full of trash and drunken, noisy, unruly people. Spring Break (and memorial day weekend) used to be finite events. Now the same chaos is happening every night. Street racing, fights, urinating in public, condoms, dog and human feces on sidewalks, all of that and more under a lingering stench of weed smoke.
If that's not testament to how Airbnb can ruin entire communities, I don't know what is.
The locals are complaining [1], [2] but nothing seems to change except more money being thrown at police and local interests.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/Residents-for-a-safe-Ocean-Drive-13...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/SouthBeachSludgeReport/
[3] https://wsvn.com/news/local/video-shows-spring-breakers-atta...
Typical night in SOBE.
I lived a few doors down to someone who basically ran an ad hoc AirBnB ... before Airbnb. It was pretty terrible. Parties all the time, trash, they parked anywhere (in other people's driveways...) because there were likely no long term consequences for doing so, the folks staying there didn't care because why should they? I was on the association board, it's kinda thankless job as we had to deal with this house. We g…
>In the end it was just a horrible situation to open up what was a hotel, right in the middle of our association / neighborhood. By joining a HOA, you've delegated away to the collective the right to dictate to your neighbors what they can and can't do with their own property. In your case, the system worked - because you are in a HOA. If people want to exert that kind of collectivist control over their neighbors, th…
Because any livable set of laws recognizes that externalities are a thing and need to be addressed.
I, as a homeowner, can't start amassing a large pile of radioactive material on my property. I can't start a home-based waste incineration company, even if the structure exists entirely on my property. There's a ton of stuff I can't do, because there are laws prohibiting it.
If the laws right now don't address "you can't invite enough strangers to your house such that it causes a lot of waste or damage to your neighborhood," then that's just because we didn't have broadly accessible systems in place to invite those strangers; it doesn't mean that that's now or has ever been okay, just like collecting a pile of radioactive waste in my backyard hasn't been okay since we learned about the harms of radiation poisoning.
"Why can't people do x?" Because we live in a society.