Housing is a service, and landlords, who provide this service, take principal risk as well as pay for maintenance, taxes, and other costs. Why should those who provide such a service, such as housing, not earn rent for their efforts and risk? Developers buy properties in bad neighborhoods in the hope of improving and renting them, but without profit, where is the incentive to invest? It's a two sided-equation: for services to exist, there must be an incentive for the other side to provide said service, and that incentive is profit.

Regular apartment rentals often lock renters for multi-month contracts (due to difficulty, length, and expense of the eviction process, in which landlords lose money during the lengthy eviction process, when a renter rents for a single month and does not leave after not paying); air BNB, although it's more expensive per night, doesn't have such long time commitments for renters.

>Housing is a service, and landlords, who provide this service, take principal risk as well as pay for maintenance, taxes, and other costs.

You gloss over "other costs". Many anti-AirBnB people's concerns are precisely about those other costs.

It's evident in this discussion who are the people pushing the externalities onto others, and who are the people having to deal with them.

Can you give an example of an externality unique to AirBnB landlords that is pushed onto others and the others are unable to force the landlord into accepting responsibility for it?

"Developers buy properties in bad neighborhoods in the hope of improving and renting them, but without profit, where is the incentive to invest?*"

Precisely, there should be no profit incentive. Society doesn't need lazy landlords speculating on gentrification. I don't give a fuck if you're disincentivised to own 8 homes which you can rent out while you holiday in the carribean. Productive societies needs affordable housing for all classes of people. Property is not an asset for speculation or a VC-backed venture return model. Feel free to invest your spare cash in innovation and businesses seeking growth.

My experience was that subletting allowed otherwise hungry poverty line individuals live well when work was hard to come by. Adding to that the volume of extra tourist money in the cities is net positive for local businesses, which in turn creates more work too. The answer to airbnb is not to limit it but simply to build more apartments. This is not good for the existing wealthy property owners as it could bring down the value of their assets so we get hardcore regulation instead.

Me too. Hacker news loves usury and rentiers though. They think these people are running a business.