There are many ways! The ones used by myself, my friends, and my family when moving to The Big City and looking for a job/permanent housing included:

  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*.)

Ok, I wasn't being entirely literal. The point is AirBnB was just about the only way to find safe, convenient, relatively affordable housing for a few weeks. And it's probably going to get worse now given that this legislation applies to services like Craigslist as well.

And I think the point that people are trying to make is that your convenience may be coming at the expense of others.

I think that's a false assumption. Is AirBnB really the bottleneck for NYC rents?

AirBNB units make up 1/5 of 1% of the NYC's rental units. A bottleneck? no, but sizable and impactful, especially when you consider that these tend to be clustered around where they're convenient.

> where they're convenient

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.

and the question is how?

I feel like you proved his point for him. All of these are insanely uncomfortable and poor options.

>a number of people I know started off renting a bed, not even a bedroom

Was it worth it?

Eh, I don't know that most of the people I knew who sublet half a bedroom would ask themselves that question.

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.

> NYC has an incredible dearth of affordable housing.

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

You mean Manhattan has a dearth of affordable housing. Nobody's complaining about AirBnB's in Coney Island.

Most of Brooklyn, Queens and at least 2/3 of the Bronx has an affordable housing crisis as well.

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

And you think AirBnB has anything to do with the rental prices in the Bronx or Queens?

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.

When I moved here 9 or so years ago I signed a lease on a studio without seeing it first.

Honestly, it wasn't so hard.

Hard? No, but that's an undeniably worse process.

I could have also rented a room for a couple of months while I figured things out (which is still legal, even on Airbnb), but this was a rent stabilized apartment in a nice neighborhood. It's pretty common for deals like that to be rented sight unseen.

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.

> It's pretty common for deals like that to be rented sight unseen.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

It's two sides of the same coin. Tourists and transients displace long term residents, no?

NYC already has a rent-stabilization policy -- so generally speaking they don't. In fact, tourism bolsters the local economy which provides jobs for local residents.

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 Stabilization has been in the process of being phased out since 1970:

- 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).

But it's a very slow process: a majority of NYC residents live in below-market-rate housing. And Bill de Blasio's mayor campaign was anchored on preventing "affordable housing" units from leaving the pool, so the rate of decrease may have slowed down.

The law does not prohibit short term AirBnB rentals in general. It prohibits them when the owner does not also occupy the unit. You'd still be able to use AirBnB to rent someone's spare room short term.