Re:Cuomo signs bill prohibiting Airbnb listings in NYC
by geofft on Friday October 21, 2016 @04:57PM
(#12764701)
There are two reasons it's not as simple as that.
The first is that there are a ton of rules about owning property, and (for the most part) nobody thinks that any of those other rules mean that it's not really the owner's property. There are zoning laws, for instance: if I own a house, I can't run a business there. If I own an office building, I can't live there. If I own a three-story building, I probably can't knock it down and replace it with a forty-story building. There's the rule of law: if I run a suspected meth lab in my basement, or harbor a suspected criminal in a spare bedroom, the state gets to barge in. There's taxes: if I don't give the state money merely for the privilege of owning property, it gets to take the property back. There are rent control/stabilization laws: depending on what my property is, I can't charge more than a certain amount to rent it out, even if the tenant is willing to pay. There are certainly political theories under which all of those mean that I don't really own the property, but those aren't the theories we live under. Airbnb shouldn't get an excuse just because we want to start theorizing at that particular point.
The second is that, for most rental property in New York, the state is already involved. There are tax exemption programs, subsidies, city services and infrastructure, and all sorts of things without which the building would not have existed in the first place. The state is more than free to set conditions on buildings where it helped with the construction, even if that condition is "We get to set rules arbitrarily forevermore" - if an owner doesn't want to agree, they're welcome to try building without the state's help.
The first is that there are a ton of rules about owning property, and (for the most part) nobody thinks that any of those other rules mean that it's not really the owner's property. There are zoning laws, for instance: if I own a house, I can't run a business there. If I own an office building, I can't live there. If I own a three-story building, I probably can't knock it down and replace it with a forty-story building. There's the rule of law: if I run a suspected meth lab in my basement, or harbor a suspected criminal in a spare bedroom, the state gets to barge in. There's taxes: if I don't give the state money merely for the privilege of owning property, it gets to take the property back. There are rent control/stabilization laws: depending on what my property is, I can't charge more than a certain amount to rent it out, even if the tenant is willing to pay. There are certainly political theories under which all of those mean that I don't really own the property, but those aren't the theories we live under. Airbnb shouldn't get an excuse just because we want to start theorizing at that particular point.
The second is that, for most rental property in New York, the state is already involved. There are tax exemption programs, subsidies, city services and infrastructure, and all sorts of things without which the building would not have existed in the first place. The state is more than free to set conditions on buildings where it helped with the construction, even if that condition is "We get to set rules arbitrarily forevermore" - if an owner doesn't want to agree, they're welcome to try building without the state's help.