The phrase "[the] sharing economy" continues to grate. It's the "renting economy".
A bunch of entities, through technological means, enable people to efficiently make parts of their capital rentable.
There's no sharing involved, here.
September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#22Hey, FYI, blog owner: You're serving some form of terrible dot-matrix font from the 80s ("monserrat") to Chrome/Windows. This was the first time in months I've had to dig in with the inspector and disable a font just so that I could read an article. Might want to fix that.
If I recall correctly, this is the (lackof I think) Direct Write bug. Take a look in About://flags and toggle the one with Direct Write (I think your turning it on) and it should look far prettier.
Are you seriously suggesting that he put a banner on his blog asking his users to monkey around with experimental flags just so they can read text on the page?
While I'm personally technical enough to deal with wackiness like this when I come across it, most people are not. Given that, maybe a better solution would be to choose a font that the most popular browser on the most popular operating system can render out of the box. That's why I pointed it out.
Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#23I just got back from a week vacation, staying in a house we rented through VRBO.com. Can anyone explain why VRBO, which has been in operation for 15 years, and explicitly focuses on renting out 2nd homes, has not faced the backlash and scrutiny that AirBnB has? Is it just that they have not done enough volume to get the regulators' attention? Because reading about the proposed rules in this article, VRBO rentals seem…
I think it has to do with the whole 'explicitly focuses on renting out 2nd homes' deal. To me, it makes more sense to allow people to rent out properties that they own rather than units that they themselves are renting. I'm fine with someone renting their summer cottage on a lake in Vermont - less fine with someone explicitly renting scarce property in SF for the sole purpose of flipping on Airbnb.
Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#24Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is you don't "qualify" for rent control in SF. You automatically get it when you move into a building built before 1979. Then the landlord can only increase rent (as a general rule) by about 1% per year. So there are people living in 4 bedroom homes in the middle of the best parts of the Mission paying $1000 a month in rent where market rate would be between $6000-8000.
Man, I don't understand anything about SF housing :p At that point, the landlords should be putting all their places on AirBNB themselves! Or arranging for tenants to sublet at market rates and taking a cut under the table, to reduce their chance of being exposed a bit.
They can't just kick out the current tenants to do that.
Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#26I don't know how AirBnB works in San Francisco, but in other countries it IS mostly a tax-evading hotel alternative, and renting out primary residences is very, very rare. I'm looking for rentals in a South American city, and there are quite a few owners with 10+ properties (more the norm than the exception), and I actually prefer those (I've had bad experiences with sloppy hosts, professional hosts haven't let me do…
I suspect that renting out primary residences is more common in rural areas where someone would otherwise operate a B&B.
Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#27I think one of the biggest advantages of the proposed laws is freeing up rent controlled units that are currently be hoarded for Airbnb and not being used as primary residences.
How many units are we talking about here? 10? 100? 1000? 10000?
I doubt it's more than a couple hundred. That's a lot of people who can't find good housing for sure, but I doubt it's enough to have any real impact on the price of rental housing in the city.
Re: September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I recall correctly, this is the (lackof I think) Direct Write bug. Take a look in About://flags and toggle the one with Direct Write (I think your turning it on) and it should look far prettier.
Are you seriously suggesting that he put a banner on his blog asking his users to monkey around with experimental flags just so they can read text on the page? While I'm personally technical enough to deal with wackiness like this when I come across it, most people are not. Given that, maybe a better solution would be to choose a font that the most popular browser on the most popular operating system can render out o…
No, he is suggesting you jacked up your settings and offered a solution for you. Tested on a half dozen different combos of Chrome/Windows here and no issues.