181–190 of 200 posts
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the negative reaction to this here. The HN demographic is presumably tilted towards young men. What those criticisms seem to be neglecting is that those--particularly for apartment buildings--these temporary visitors impact beyond just you. In Australia, for example, one useful metric used by people when assessing apartment buildings to buy in is to look at the ratio of owner-occup…
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There's a 100% chance that I won't. Strangers, even unvetted ones, almost never pose a danger to children. The vast majority of harm done to children is done by friends and family. Having more strangers around makes your kids safer, if anything.
This is why, when I need sitting for my middle-school aged kids, I drop them off in the middle of Union Station instead of bringing them to their grandparents.
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So much text, so little substance. Let's sum up your arguments for why this is good. 1) HN wouldn't understand because they're young men 2) Value of property in an area can go down 3) Property can suffer damages 4) Rentals may inconvenience neighbors All these points can be overcome without eroding our property rights. While values of homes can go down, they can also go up. Property can be damaged, but it can also be…
> Property can be damaged, but it can also be insured. You are missing the point. I don't want common property in my condo building to be damaged, period. It just spoils my day.
may i interest you in some Bear Patrol Tax?
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> Airbnb rooms are usually more pleasant than the lower quality hotels a lot of businesses book. I suggest you browse areas with high AirBNB usage. In NYC, a nice AirBNB will cost roughly the same as the equivalent hotel room. > Once it becomes socially normal in larger corporations, a lot of employees will ask to be booked with airbnb. This is unlikely. The only reason to choose AirBNB is price, and the low price op…
What you say about Airbnb vs. hotel costs in NYC is wildly not my experience. At the high end, the rooms available on Airbnb simply aren't available in hotels at all; I'd wager, if you did your best at apples-apples, Airbnb is roughly half as expensive as a hotel room. The nondeterminism thing with Abnb is a good point. I've always figured that if something fell through, I'd just book a same-night hotel, but it was a…
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I don't think Hilton, Hyatt, Wyndham or Marriott give a shit about Airbnb; they do a full Airbnb valuation of real revenue every other quarter, and the market they service isn't "random places to stay", it's "hotel rooms". The preponderance of evidence available to message board nerds like us suggests strongly to me that enforcement of these laws is being driven by real complaints.
If it is like you say, it sounds a bit overboard to shut down everything. Maybe with some effort they could come up with regulation to solve those complaints while keeping the good renters legal.
When we talk about regs on HN, we tend to be thinking of rules, codes, and controls restricting what businesses can do. That's obviously a major function of regulation.
But another function of regulation is removal of uncertainty.
The alternative to regulation is contract and tort law. Airbnb participants who violate leases and homeowners agreements will be sued for breach; participants who create noise, theft, crime, and increased costs for neighbors will be sued for tort claims.
Court cases take for- fucking- ever to resolve themselves. Every B2B case I've witnessed up close dragged until it settled --- I've never seen (firsthand) a company stick it out to trial. The one (trivial) case I was involved in directly --- a statutory claim for unlawfully withheld security deposits --- took years to resolve.
Perhaps partly in recognition of that, and partly because of the spectacular cost of representation, the damages awarded in these cases can be enormous.
instead of simply enforcing it, they changed the law to be zero limit AND enforced it.
this is the same idiocy.
trashing a place is already illegal. Disturbing the peace is already illegal. Reducing your neighbor property value is already illegal (our intern complains he keep getting citations for not cutting the grass ...a $300 fine)
Name ONE thing this law does that wasn't illegal before. ONE. I challenge you.
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What you say about Airbnb vs. hotel costs in NYC is wildly not my experience. At the high end, the rooms available on Airbnb simply aren't available in hotels at all; I'd wager, if you did your best at apples-apples, Airbnb is roughly half as expensive as a hotel room. The nondeterminism thing with Abnb is a good point. I've always figured that if something fell through, I'd just book a same-night hotel, but it was a…
I'm not sure what you qualify as high-end, but our different experiences may be a factor of differing price points.
* A 4-bedroom 2-storey attached (townhouse-style) house in W'burg, less than a block from the Bedford stop; full kitchen, back yard(!). Cost less than any 3-star pair of adjoining bedrooms we could find --- and we booked 2 months in advance.
* A full-kitchen king bed studio in Chelsea, for ~150/night.
The last one is from a few months ago, the other from last year.
By the way: both of these feel like textbook cases of the kind of situation where Abnb is a win for everyone involved. The owner of the house was picky about us, checked in on us while we were there, and was renting a whole building to one party. The Chelsea apartment was its occupant's primary residence; they were renting it out while themselves traveling.
I think it's the situations where people are literally running full-time businesses on top of Abnb where we start to run into trouble.
For my friend's wedding, we stayed at such a place. I had a long conversation with the owner, who lived in a side room. It looked like an extension he built on the house. He told me he was running into issues with the city. Not from hotels or what not, but complaints from neighbors. They did not like the fact that strangers were constantly going in and out. BUT he said that he had heard hotels and motels were not hap…
i hate all of mine. But the hotels have nothing against them. so i will have to live with them. that's life.
If you could choose neighbors... the world would be very empty because everyone would be living alone.
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This looks like a classic example of regulatory capture, where the regulator becomes an effective barrier to new entrants to the market. Factor in the concentrated nature of the hotel industry (fewer of them, more at stake) and you can see why they are motivated and able to put pressure on the bureaucracy. The whole thing does strike me as morally irresponsible in that a city with a persistent and undealt with homele…
The whole thing does strike me as morally irresponsible in that a city with a persistent and undealt with homeless problem should not be limiting the availability of housing units until the blatant market failure has been dealt with. Red herring. These people are not inviting the homeless into their homes. They are operating a hotel/B&B without following any registration, safety, health, or tax rules.
This is really troubling and sickening. It's your property and you should be able to do as you please with it. What is the value of ownership if what you own is under government and HOA control? Disgusting. The fact that we allow government to get involved in our personal lives at this level should scare everyone. They are telling some of these people that they can't earn money to make-up for the fact that they fell…
Try to run a pig farm on your home and see how far you get with that. The law of "nuisance" has existed for hundreds of years. Your right to use your property extends only as far as the limits of your property. If any of the effects spill over to your neighbors, they have the right to limit what you can do with your property (to the extent of the "spill over"). This has been basic American/British property law for ce…