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Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

news.airbnb.com

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Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#601

Post by wombatpm »

dheera wrote: post #577
jacobr1 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the black box for legal purposes still presumes you are in-office. When you are remote, you are structured as working from your "home office" not anywhere.

Hm. What if my home office was a van, or a private jet? Couldn't one just structure it as a consultancy? I mean, if I hire a consultant to do something for me, I could just pay them through PayPal or Venmo or even Ethereum and wouldn't need to know where their office is. Onus is on them to be legally able to work and pay their taxes.

That works because it’s a 1099 situation. But FICA, tax withholding and health care benefits are all tied up in your place of residence. Assuming you have a driver’s license and a voters registration, there is someplace you call home otherwise you are just a hobo

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#602

Post by izacus »

2rsf wrote: post #301
somethoughts wrote: post #112

I'm kinda of curious how this works if you are remote: "Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time. Some roles, especially senior roles, will be expected to gather more often. We’ll do our best to define windows when most large team off-sites will occur and give you plenty of notice so you can make it work with personal and family plans." Is this like just plan to be in the…

It is also not clear who will pay for travelling, if you can work from anywhere but must be in a very specific place and time then travel cost can be significant. Assume I want to work from a small town in North Sweden where housing is really affordable while internet is still fast how will I get to SF?

The company covering all costs, including flight, lodging and food, is a normal standard pretty much everywhere for these events.

It is business travel after all.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#604

Post by jonny_eh »

illiac786 wrote: post #459
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, i live in a country with massive housing issues in our cities (well... like most other countries), and banning airbnb is mentioned a couple of times a week now in mainstream media. And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from…

I think banning airbnb outright is not a good idea. They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there, because otherwise it's not worth it. Might be a pain to control across multiple renting platforms, but it's possible and if you catch a couple of persons and condemn them to high fines, this will make the rounds and other sho…

> They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there…

This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#605

Post by munificent »

jen20 wrote: post #589
bluefirebrand wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not who you were asking, but I can take a stab at this. Short Term rentals of homes or condo units can erode a sense of community in an area where that's a common behavior. AirBnB renters aren't going to be around long so they have no incentive to be respectful to common areas, or respectful of noise levels or whatever else. Imagine buying a condo and all of the units around you are AirBnBs, or otherwise short term r…

> Imagine buying a condo and all of the units around you are AirBnBs All of my recent research into condos showed any building where this could be an issue has explicit prohibition on short term rentals as part of the HOA. The more egregious HOAs even have prohibition on long-term rentals without a permit which can be denied by the HOA.

I think you are reinforcing their point.

The idea is to imagine what that would be like. The reality is so obviously undesirable that HOAs outright prohibit it.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#606

Post by throwawayboise »

schrodinger wrote: post #564
dheera wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm curious about how they have rights to even know where you are at any given time. If you're an in-office employee, your responsibilities are (a) show up at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done. If you're defined as a fully remote employee, your responsibilities are (a) be online and available at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done. Besides that you're just an amorphous black box,…

You can't just legally avoid taxes by not letting your employer know. Sure, they prob won't know and you'll get away with it, but you're technically breaking the law and an employer won't knowingly condone that. So it's not that they have a right to know where you are, it's that if they do notice and not act on it that's a legal risk to them as well since they're enabling it. (IANAL but this feels common sense.)

The simple answer is to do away with the notion that earning income should be taxable. Tax on the consumption side, it's easier to enforce and harder to avoid.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#607

Post by dan-robertson »

devmor wrote: post #237
Gud wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the cities the losers? I travel a lot for work(300 days/year) and I don’t have an apartment, so when I’m not working I’m pretty much also traveling. Occasionally I use Airbnb and I think it’s a much nicer option than hotels.

Because it's almost impossible to purchase a house if you live and work in a large city now. Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.

It seems like Airbnb is an easy scapegoat to use for the actual problem of not enough houses existing/being built. Another scapegoat is ‘foreign investors’ but I think this also isn’t true. In the US I think the people willing to make cash offers for houses in expensive cities are often the rich people who live there. There are also companies that will advance you the cash so that you can make a cash offer before going through the whole mortgage process, which seems a bit silly but if these companies exist then some people making cash offers must also be regularish wealthy home buyers who will use regular mortgages.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#608

Post by throwawaygh »

bko wrote: post #590
throwawaygh wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also why are you optimizing for lower rents... What about the homeowners who benefit from having more things they can do with their property? Because basic shelter is WAY lower on the hierarchy of needs than rental income, and shelter is not a need that the US is adequately meeting even for its middle class.

If you think the US should be doing more the shelter people without adequate shelter it should do so directly. Creating market distortions that purposely reduces the value of property and discourages production of the good is not the way to go. That would be like banning expensive restaurants because they're running up rent on inexpensive restaurants and soup kitchens. After all, desert is way lower on the hierarchy…

> Creating market distortions that purposely reduces the value of property and discourages production of the good is not the way to go.

Zoning laws already create market distortions. A zoning law that prevents building denser residential property is no more or less distortionary than a policy that prohibits short-term rentals.

Also, reducing the future expected value of property does not discourage builders; they only care about the sale price today (or, today + build time).

> That would be like banning expensive restaurants because they're running up rent on inexpensive restaurants and soup kitchens.

Restaurants are also far higher on the hierarchy of needs than shelter.

We do distort the market in favor of soup kitchens -- they have substantial tax benefits and in many places they can operate out of differently zoned property.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#609

Post by munificent »

bko wrote: post #593
kimbernator wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't who is staying there, it's the fact that they are just random people that don't have any stake in the surrounding community except for their 2-night stay there. Comparing this to redlining is absurd.

They're not "random people". They're human beings. What's optimal time of stay? Maybe ban students or renters as well. Might stay longer than 2 nights but certainly they dont have a "stake in the surrounding community". Might as well ban hotels while you're at it. Again, trying to engineer who lives in your community is wrong IMO

I'm sorry, but given the unwarranted extreme language you're using, this is clearly a trigger issue for you independent of what the parent comment was saying.

No one is talking about "rights", "control", "redlining", or dehumanization.

All they are doing is observing that people like to live next to human beings they can form longer-term relationships with. This is the fundamental fabric of human society and there is nothing wrong with people desiring that. That doesn't necessarily mean they have any "right" to "control" or "engineer" it. But people who want to have deeper ties to a community (which has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success) have every reason to try to influence their neighborhood to enable that.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#610

Post by throwawayboise »

pedrosorio wrote: post #536
frankfrankfrank wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose people start reconsidering this imposed situation that exists between the people who do the work and the government, i.e. the parasitic ruling class. And to clarify, I say that as someone who is not at all “leftist” oriented, even though it may seem so at first glance of reading that to some. This situation we currently essentially globally have, at least in the west, is quite an abusive system that is real…

People work because they need money to survive (pay bills, rent, food, etc.), not because "the ruling class is imposing taxes through government". A consumption tax will do nothing to reduce the power of the "ruling class" since their consumption is a much smaller fraction of their income compared to the working man.

Consumption as a fraction may be smaller but as a number it's much larger. Wealthy people own larger homes (often more than one), more and more expensive cars, boats, private aircraft, any number of other toys. They spend more on clothes, entertainment, virtually every other category of spending is higher if you are wealthy. Maybe they spend about the same amount on toilet paper.
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