NY official: Airbnb stay illegal; host fined $2,400

I've had this argument with several people. Their position is that "it's my house/apartment, I should be able to do what I want with it" (even when renting they use this argument).

My argument is that this is not and has never been true. You can't, for example, run a tannery in your apartment.

What's more, as a resident (and especially if I were an owner) I wouldn't want my building being a de facto hotel. An endless stream of people coming and going, having building keys and so on.

I don't believe this ruling is anything new. I believe short stay (A friend of a friend lives in a building where the super was soldering a pipe and managed to burn the entire building to the ground (gutted the inside that is).

Imagine the scenario if an AirBnBer does this with say a cigarette?

Or what if someone is assaulted by such a person?

Residency laws exist for a reason. Honestly, AirBnB just seems like a massive liability time bomb waiting to go off.

Could you please clarify which of those circumstances do not apply today?

Especially the basic one that most housing space is intended for residency which, by its nature, is less lucrative then short-term renting?

Quite on the contrary, in this case I think that the circumstances here are even pointing towards more regulation and AirBNB is accellerating that.

I can't say that I'm at all surprised. Moreover, I would expect to see more judges, as well as legislatures, pass such rules. I've discovered (full-disclosure: through consulting work with a site similar to AirBNB) that many vested interests -- typically hotels and real-estate organizations -- don't want such sites to operate. Until and unless the legislators are convinced to change the rules by a popular, grass-roots demand to allow it, things won't change so fast.

And you know what? I'm not sure if they should.

My family has used VRBO ("vacation rental by owner") to rent apartments in Paris, Amsterdam, and Budapest over the last three summers. We loved the experience, and would never even consider going to a hotel in the future, for all of the reasons you can imagine -- we save money, cook our own meals, and feel at "home" in a foreign city. It's a marvelous feeling.

But that marvelous feeling is probably less-than-marvelous for a city's permanent residents. When we stayed in Paris, we were told that short-term rentals there are illegal partly because housing is in short supply, and is thus astronomically expensive. Forbidding short-term rentals, in theory, can increase the pool for annual rentals, thus bringing the cost down. (We were also told that rental law was 100 years old, but was only now going to be enforced. Amusingly, we were also told that the French justice minister lived in our building...)

Plus, I don't know if I would want an apartment in my building to be occupied by new people each week. We have enough trouble with the neighbors we know.

Bottom line, AirBNB is a brilliant idea, and many people clearly love it. But I don't think that they, or we, can expect laws to change immediately to accommodate this new idea. And when the laws do change, we can probably expect them to still impose some restrictions, or even taxes, on the homeowners.

It also doesn't mean that the laws should be repealed. In the context of things like AirBnB and Kickstarter, people tend to only see the "good side" because the laws prevent the large-scale "bad side" from taking root. E.g. they see someone putting their apartment on AirBnB while they're on vacation, but not the shady dude turning an entire building on a quiet residential block into an AirBnB hotel for rowdy college students. They see someone funding a video game on Kickstarter, but not the people swindling the public on a large scale.

It's interesting to note that people jump on Goldman for selling shitty financial products too retirement funds and the like, but don't see the potential for abuse with something like crowdfunding. If Goldman can make a killing swindling sophisticated institutional investors, don't you think it'd be child's play for someone to do it to unsophisticated members of the public?

These sorts of laws have the incidental effect of suppressing potentially useful transactions on an individual level, but the point of them is to prevent people from making a business out of abusing the system. E.g. I have noted before that the real point of copyright protections isn't to keep an individual from copying a Windows CD for a friend (probably not going to do a lot of economic damage to Microsoft), but to keep a major Chinese OEM from shipping computers with copied Windows licenses (might do a lot more economic damage). These regulations are similar in that regard. By making them illegal, you keep people from building a large-scale business out of cheating others.

I don't think there has to be a rational argument against AirBnB. I could create a business telling people that I'll tell you how to get rich, charge them $10,000 and then tell them "Work hard and look for opportunity." and you could say that's horrible and whatever else but there's no rational argument against it.

Living standards isn't something you can rationally argue. I don't care about visitors passing through my neighborhood; I care about the fact that my neighbor is bringing someone new into my neighborhood every weak. I care about the fact that people in NYC can't find a place to live. I care about the fact that even though I live in a safe neighborhood, that can quickly change overnight because that's how fast the people around me can change.

Yes it's personal paranoia but at the same time it's a debate and the residents of NYC are against it but people supporting AirBnB have said nothing but how good it is for travelers.