I have a neighbor (he was here before me) who gets drunk about every weekend and does exactly that. We do have noise ordinances. The police never bothers to show up.

How can I also blame this on AirBnB and possibly extort them for large amounts of money? /s

Seems to me that your complaint is about a lack of noise ordinances (which does not apply to SF, the subject of this article), a matter that should be fairly easy to correct and much less controversial than this whole airbnb kerfuffle.

I don't think short-term tenants are any more likely than long-term tenants or owners to be terrible neighbors; I've seen some awful examples of both. Unfortunately, people who are inconsiderate jerks are going to be lousy neighbors regardless of how they came to occupy the premises. Laying blame for a tenant's inconsiderate behavior at the feet of a particular broker is absurd; you may as well ban truckers from entering your city because they might deliver lead-based paint. If airbnb went away, someone else would fill the niche; there's obviously plenty of demand for short-term rental broking. And you're always going to have to deal with bad neighbors -- often of the much more permanent variety. It would be a lot more constructive to think about the behavior you want to prohibit than tertiary factors like who arranged for a lease or how many days it was for. The whole point of inconsiderate jerks -- and if you'd ever had one for a neighbor you would know this -- is that they don't care what you think! They're not thinking "gee, I'd better not be such an asshole, because I'm going to be living next to this guy for years!". They're thinking "I like cranking my death metal to 11 at 3am and there's no law against it so they can suck it." That is, if they're even aware of your existence at all. Because that's the kind of people they are. What's the worst you're going to do, not lend them your lawnmower?

Seriously, I don't care if airbnb succeeds or fails. They don't pay me, I don't own their stock, and I don't pretend that they're making the world a better place or any of that tripe. They're just one more private corporation that wants to make a buck, and they seem to have found a much better way to serve a particular market than the dozens of other substantially indistinguishable competitors. Good for them. If it turns out that the only people who lease short-term rentals are inconsiderate jerks, then airbnb won't be doing much business once those inconsiderate jerks are sitting in jails. The anti-airbnb crowd seems to be shooting the messenger, while the pro-airbnb crowd seems to be elevating a glorified classified-ad publisher to sainthood for doing nothing more interesting than connecting willing buyers and sellers. Everyone needs to get over it and focus instead on what matters. This company just isn't interesting enough to justify having a strong opinion about it.

No contortion of logic allows you to escape the fact that Airbnb has vastly increased the number of people renting out homes and apartments. The demand for short term vacation rentals certainly existed previously. Airbnb lowered the barriers to entry for a huge volume of new supply, private primary residences. The short term residential rental market simply did not exist at anything close to the current volume before Airbnb. It is an undeniable cause and effect relationship. So saying that blaming Airbnb for problems stemming from short term residential rentals is "shooting the messenger" is more than a little intellectually dishonest.

I'm not contorting anything. I'm saying that whether there are 50 or 5 million short-term rentals is irrelevant, and you should stop looking for a convenient corporation to attack and start solving a problem that existed long before it was founded... and will exist long after it perishes.

You are being willfully ignorant of basic logic. The high number of short term residential rentals _is the problem_. Airbnb exclusively facilitated the overwhelming majority of these short term rentals. Ergo, Airbnb created this problem. Due to the nature of cause and effect, the problem did not exist before it was created by Airbnb. Being the creator of the problem makes them the correct entity to attack.

We'll have to agree to disagree. To me, bad neighbor behavior is the problem, and I've seen nothing here to make me change my mind.

If one of your neighbors is renting their house short term on a regular basis, you all of the sudden have a constant flow of new neighbors. The larger pool of neighbors increases the likelihood of bad neighbors. If other permanent neighbors see the original neighbor is doing good business, they may start renting their house out, further increasing your likelihood of bad neighbors. I realize that minds are never changed this far down a comment chain, but certainly you have to appreciate that Airbnb increases the cumulative number of people in areas where there service is used. Given a normal distribution of people, increased numbers of people results in increased numbers of bad actors.