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.