This seems like it maintains the sharing spirit of something like AirBnB (rent your place out occasionally when you're away) while preventing the problems that come from people essentially running unregulated hotels..

Relaxing the law in the manner you suggest would make it even more difficult to enforce than the law as it stood prior to this addition.

Just like governments demand companies hand over financial information they could demand that AirBnb hands over the list of users and the total stay length.

It can easily handle at most a dozen sharing sites. And it's trivial to prevent landlords from registering multiple accounts i.e. make sure no two landlords advertise the same address.

In a nutshell: 60 days max, fire safety equipment is mandatory, and the building home owner's association (body corporate) need to agree to it.

The city produced a one-pager to spell it out:

https://www.amsterdam.nl/publish/pages/707219/infographic_ho...

We the "people" who are not the "powerful" are getting pushed further away from the center each year chasing afforadable housing. Pretty soon we'll end up in Jersey or Long Island.

https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20151127/hells-kitchen-clin...

Edit: Nice throwaway. Tell us about your Airbnb unit!

The main problem with this sort of thing is that while it is easy to say that, it isn't actually always an option for folks. This is part of the reason why folks don't always just "move to where jobs are available."

Moving costs money and takes quite an effort. Minimally, for cost you have first month's rent and a deposit, usually equal. Sometimes last month's rent. There are fees for utilities, and sometimes deposits for them if you change companies. Collect boxes: Secure moving vehicles if you don't have something to move large stuff.

Heck, you might not even be able to move for months if the landlord starting allowing it after you signed your lease. Your lease might be against it, but the neighbor's doesn't.

This is truly only a win/win if you have the finances and time to be able to move.

  1.  Couch surfing with friends/family.
  2.  Youth hostels / YMCA.
  3.  Renting a terrible apartment cheap, sight-unseen,
      breaking the lease early when better options became
      available.
  4.  The Daughters of Divine Charity, et al, run boarding
      houses.
  5.  Rent a place in the outer boroughs, Jersey, Yonkers,
      etc, take the train in until you find something
      closer.
  6.  Walk around until you see "room for rent" signs.
  7.  Check papers, Craiglist for roommates (*actual* room
      sharing -- a number of people I know started off
      renting a *bed*, not even a bed*room*.)

Convenient is not the right description -- high demand is. Who's to say an AirBnB is a worse use of space for, say, a unit in SoHo than a year-round resident?

AirBnB has real issues -- zoning, hotel tax, safety, etc -- but politicians like to use rent cost/resident displacement because it's an easy rallying call.

Was it worth it?

Subletting half a bedroom from a total stranger can be inconvenient and occasionally weird but if you're fresh out of college it's not really that different from the dorm room experience for most people. And it usually costs less than half what an apartment does a month, and is usually month to month or so.

I fixed that for you. The thing is, in most cases what is being done with these units was already illegal.

Picking out the one or two unattractive neighborhoods to live in doesn't really do anyone any good.

I'm just saying I don't really feel bad about a unit in Lower Manhattan somewhere being off the market because it's rented to tourists.

Honestly, it wasn't so hard.

Either way, there are many options for moving to the city. This doesn't really make moving to the city significantly more difficult than it has always been.

Given the prevalence of the broker industry I'm not sure that's the case.

Either way -- the city only cares because they're missing out on hotel taxes. I don't think the city actually cares too much about who can afford an apartment in the desirable neighborhoods that have a high volume of AirBnBs.

I paid a broker that I found on Craigslist. No one said renting an apartment in NYC doesn't suck.

> I don't think the city actually cares too much about who can afford an apartment in the desirable neighborhoods that have a high volume of AirBnBs.

As a resident that lives in one of those desirable Brooklyn neighborhoods that has turned into Times Square for European tourists, I actually do think the city is looking out for me.

Now that's an honest argument: "I just don't like tourists". The whole raising-prices-displacing-real-new-yorkers thing is just disingenuous.

I personally disagree with time spent being a metric for who gets to live here and who doesn't but people don't take kindly to that sentiment in the US.

- Rent Control simply doesn't exist if you or a relative you co-habitated for years with under special conditions lived there before then.

- Rent Stabilization for a unit ends the moment the stabilized rent hits within striking distance of market rate or the number of stabilized units in-building drops below a threshold. More units deregulate every year than are added and this is true year over year as well (sole exceptions to the latter being in 2014 & 2015).