> a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment

That would be OK, but renting for short term should be illegal? If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them. If owners don't pay their due taxes, call IRS on them. It's no reason to make it illegal to rent for short term.

I have used AirBnb in many cities on 4 continents and was always respectful to the locals and even tried my best to follow the specific recycling rules and such.

What I enjoy the most is the organic feeling of being in a real apartment vs being in a hotel room. Hotel rooms all feel the same, wherever you go. What I want is to experience the same perspective as a local, well, at least to attempt to do that, and that is because I appreciate the different cultures.

Banning short term apartment rentals would send a bad message to people who just want to appreciate your culture.

> If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them.

And what happens when that leads to calling the cops every weekend, for a different group of people?

I'll tolerate my neighbour having a loud party on his 25th birthday, or him accidentally banging his suitcase down the stairs at 5.30 when he's catching an early flight. I'll do the same, equally infrequently.

It's simply not fair to have that behaviour every fucking weekend, which was what happened when an apartment in the building was put on AirBnB.

Fortunately, the listing was removed the day after I sent it to the landlord, and the noise has stopped. I highly doubt any tax was paid on the income, which is also wrong.

Maybe AirBnb should allow neighbors to comment on disturbing behavior by tourists. Responsibility and consequences could follow a tourist wherever s/he goes.

Calling the cops on a noisy neighbor in NYC is pointless unless that neighbor is a business. The cops may pay a visit, but it the person starts making noise again, they can, they will, and the cops will not force the issue. They'll say that's for the landlord/condo association/coop board to sort out. Dealing with those entities can sometimes be extremely difficult, and can take a long time to sort out. A landlord can't evict someone without really good cause, and even then it can take a long time, during which the tenant can keep renting out over and over.

People don't want transients living in their apartment buildings for safety and other reasons. Unlike hotels in NYC, we lack the necessary security and also lacking is stringent check-in procedures that hotels have. We have doormen but they are not security guards.

It is true that NYC is a popular place to live, but the higher apartment costs are caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. These are "economic rents" -- a market failure that creates inefficient markets through use of politics by special interests -- in this case landlords that want to extract higher rents from tenants.

In general this is true (and certainly given that many HN readers live in the Bay area, it probably falls within people's personal experience), but NYC is not a great example. Parts of NYC have some degree of density restriction, but much of it (pretty much all of Manhattan, say) is among the highest-density residential areas in the US, and still very expensive, because even given all the density, there's a finite amount of land, which still means supply is constrained as compared to demand. Even given no density restrictions at all, some places would still be very expensive. Tokyo is another good example of this.

I live in Manhattan and while there is some density in parts of Manhattan, overall, the buildings are not very tall.

Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser wrote about this in his Op-Ed, Build Big Bill: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

Yeah, the buildings aren't very tall, but people are in them right now.

Before you can build a newer, bigger building, you first need to buy a large enough contiguous area from potentially several owners who don't particularly want to move. That adds friction and years of extra work to any new building, which will discourage new construction, lower supply and raise prices regardless of the zoning.

Unless you're proposing that the government begin seizing tracts of land in Manhattan on behalf of high-rise developers?

I don't think this is as much of a problem as you are making it out to be. If the east village, which is currently mostly zoned R8B[1] were tomorrow to be substantially upzoned (to say R10) you'd see lots of new construction within a year. There'd be so much money to be made that deals would happen.

[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/zoning/zoni...

That's part of it. Another major part of it is that there are major zoning restrictions. Excessive zoning laws pushes up price. This has been demonstrated time and time again.

Although everyone has a different opinion on "excessive".

This is a fair point. My original comment should have been more specific: cities with above average zoning restrictions consistently see higher housing costs. A corollary of which is that excessive zoning also leads to higher costs, unless your position is there is no city with excessive zoning.