Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments • Hacker News Board

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#231

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

uwuhn wrote: post #196

DoreenMichele wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think AirBnB remotely fits the notion of a 'flophouse.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/23131937 10 people per room.

It appears to be aimed at students, not homeless people who want to get off the street for one night.

As the Wikipedia article I linked states, flophouses were typically rented by transients -- what we generally call "the homeless" these days. The term "flophouse" originated with hobos and propagated out to the larger culture.

I was homeless for several years. The prices listed in the thing you linked are comparable to what I sometimes paid for one night for a hotel in Fresno.

There are people these days who are without permanent residence who live in hotels. Some definitions of homelessness count them as homeless.

What you linked really doesn't fit what I am talking about. I have seen articles about illegal rentals stuffing multiple people into one room in big cities. They usually found them via Craigslits, iirc.

Most AirBnB listings are along the lines of the cost of a hotel or more. From what I gather, they wind up being a hotel alternative in most cases, not something dirt cheap with no amenities that a homeless person might rent for a night or two.

I blog about homelessness. I still talk to homeless people at times. I've had a college class on homelessness. I'm not uninformed on the topic of homelessness and what homeless people today are doing to get by.

AirBnB rentals are not some bog standard coping mechanism for today's homeless, from what I gather.

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#232

Post by deepakhj » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

sushisushisushi wrote: post #105

koboll wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>But outside of that structure, what gives someone the right to dictate to their neighbors what they can and can't do with their own property? The fact that what you do with your own property often has direct effects on your neighbors. This is why zoning regulations exist, for example. And noise ordinances. And building codes. There isn't a magical forcefield that ends at your property line that prevents what you're…

A lot of zoning regulations exist to keep black people out. See single family zoning, redlining, and apartment building bans.

Texas has barely any zoning and it’s doing fine.

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#233

Post by uxp100 » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

joseph-curwen wrote: post #99

jak92 wrote: post #4

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.

Here is a story about Miami 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). Wit…

> When I first moved there the neighborhood was full of high-class tourists, a lot of Europeans. ... 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. ... The ghetto criminal element is numerous and ever present.

Your idea is that AirBnb provided cheaper lodging that made South Beach open to people outside of the European tourists that the hotels were targeting?

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#234

Post by snarf21 » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

hannob wrote: post #60

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…

I agree, most people see this as black and white and not grey. One thing to keep in mind though although making the hotels compete may lower prices for you it always comes at a the expense of someone else. In this case it affects the margins of huge hotel chains (not awful) and in the availability of housing and apartments for people who actually need to live in/near the city you are just visiting (really awful). You obviously can pass laws to swing the equilibrium away from people buying up all the property but at some point it becomes a loss after you factor in AirBNB's cut and you're back to the hotels. Like you said, this is multi-faceted.

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#235

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #93

hannob wrote: post #60

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…

Airbnb has the ability to enforce these policies internally, which would come with the bonus of not needing to lose money to local governments. 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…

To optimize within the cab rules, you’d need to have drivers purchase a medallion and only be able to make pickups in the city which issued the medallion...

To optimize within the hotel rules, you’d need hosts to get a hotel/rooming house license...

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#236

Post by duxup » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

praneshp wrote: post #111

duxup wrote: post #26

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…

> , we had a limit on how many units could rent out at once anyway so they never were going to have enough numbers What does this mean? If I owned a house in your neighborhood and had to move away for work, my options are to sell the house, or get on a waitlist till the number of houses rented out reduces? As someone that's never owned a house, that sounds like a shitty rule that should be disrupted. I'm assuming the…

gamblor956 covered our motivations for that rule very well, if government backed mortgages aren't an option it could be pretty hard to sell your house.

Folks can debate if government backed mortgages should be a thing, but as far as an association we decided we wanted to preserve the opportunity for folks to sell easily (well as easily as possible) by matching the government limits.

Some of the folks renting at the time were quite upset... until I explained for the 12th time to them that everyone renting on that day still could rent, and then there would be a limit... so they were actually in a good spot. Takes people a while to understand sometimes ;)

eropple kinda touches on a side concern about absentee landlords and such and that was very much on our mind as well.

I did say in another comment that we allowed some exceptions if the limit was reached. In fact we approved all exceptions that came our way as there were very few requests. We wanted folks to be able to rent if they had to move fast, family event, and couldn't sell quickly. We didn't want to put anyone in a bind.

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#237

Post by duxup » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #159

duxup wrote: post #26

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…

> Local governments are run by the locals and they should get to decide where businesses like that operate and zone and so forth. Local governments are the wrong level for those sorts of decisions to be made. You don't have any right to tell your neighbors what to do with their property. Now, it's legitimate for the government to make rules of general application for everyone, but local governments have too much conf…

I like to imagine there is this magic wall between properties where nothing ever crosses over and in that situation we could somehow allow an absolute property rights sort of thing.

The catch is that it just doesn't work that way.

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#238

Post by duxup » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #223

duxup wrote: post #26

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…

Your anecdote created a very strange comment string with a lot of comments from people who seem to be strongly defending libertarianism, except for the part about honoring contracts.

Sadly a lot of libertarianism seems very ... not pragmatic / thought through.

I personally like the idea of a world as simple as many imagine it, but sadly I don't think it is that simple.

A great man once said: “People don’t think it be like it is, but it do."

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#239

Post by pcwalton » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #159

duxup wrote: post #26

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…

> Local governments are run by the locals and they should get to decide where businesses like that operate and zone and so forth. Local governments are the wrong level for those sorts of decisions to be made. You don't have any right to tell your neighbors what to do with their property. Now, it's legitimate for the government to make rules of general application for everyone, but local governments have too much conf…

I mostly agree, but I do think there is a role for local government to play, as local governments tend to have more access to local information. But local government should not have the ability to be exclusionary. In other words, the state should decide how much housing, office, etc. cities must allow to be built, and cities can choose where to put it, as well as establishing reasonable height limits and so forth as long as they actually zone for the amount of building the state has mandated.

In theory, this is how the system is supposed to work here in California. We have the statewide Regional Housing Needs Allocation, which is a kind of statewide zoning that sets targets for cities, which can then zone as they want to meet those targets. Unfortunately RHNA is not enforced, and there are too many loopholes that let cities circumvent their legal obligations. The Housing Accountability Act closes some of those loopholes, but not enough. :(

Re: Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments

#240

Post by xemdetia » Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #93

hannob wrote: post #60

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…

Airbnb has the ability to enforce these policies internally, which would come with the bonus of not needing to lose money to local governments. 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…

Airbnb definitely has become a great example in the 'if you don't regulate yourself as an industry you will become regulated whether you want to or not.' Unlike some of the dynamics in some of the other industries the people that airbnb exploits are individuals who rent/own property and every new airbnb host is effectively having to relearn every problem and potential pitfall/cost that hoteliers or seasoned short-term rental property owners have already solved and priced accordingly. I feel like people don't give enough criticism of Uber/Lyft/Airbnb of them profiting off people who aren't properly evaluating their expenses as a business. Most of what they offer probably should be more expensive than what they end up being but instead because people aren't experienced enough to properly cost things and undervalue what they are providing.