The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor

Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by timthelion on Sunday February 19, 2017 @04:36PM (#13682143)

You warn me not to claim that taxes are theft by using examples of failed socialist utopias. My argument was that once people have paid their taxes, they deserve something in return, like the ability to take advantage of the infrastructure that they paid to build. If you simply take peoples money, and use it to subsidize the rich, then that is theft. This is a very different argument than that of Proudhon, who says that "property is theft", or of Thomas Paine who claims that:

>Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.

http://rationalrevolution0.tripod.com/articles/capital_distr...

Though I agree with both authors in general, my claim of theft was not the same as theirs at all.

> The main purpose of public transport is to enable those living in the outskirts to get to the center in the morning, and go back in the evening. The drive to separate out work from living quarters goes back to the industrial revolution when work suddenly became noisy, dangerous and polluting, so the old model (working and living in the same place) had to go. This required mass transport, be it cars or public transport Anyway, there is nothing wrong with living in the outskirts. Many prefer it, especially those with children.

In Prague, most people don't work in the center, so the commuting to the center argument is a mute point. The center is literally only for tourists.

> Yes, and why is this interesting? The minimum wage in Malawi is ... what $1 per year? The cost of accomodation always correlates strongly with the average income

The reason why it is interesting, is that a €50 flight to Brussels, and a €8O AirBnB stay for two nights, would be a third of a months salary at Czech minimum wage. So it is totally unrealistic for people on the east who make that kind of money to travel west. However, westerners have no trouble traveling east. (Some eastern students are able to travel west, but they are among the wealthy).

> economies of scale

Economies of scale do not exist in the urban housing market, because supply is pretty much fixed. The more demand, the higher the price.

I'm not %100 against AirBnB. But I feel that the use of AirBnB to rent out whole apartments is unfair in cities where taxpayers heavily subsidize infrastructure and common spaces. Especially when the investor is a foreign one. Then the money from the west flows east and then flows right back out again.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by mafribe on Monday February 20, 2017 @05:07AM (#13686022)

   Economies of scale do not exist in 
   the urban housing market, because 
   supply is pretty much fixed. The 
   more demand, the higher the price.

This is not the case, and the issue has been discussed many times here on HN with respect to San Francisco.

There is no technical reason that prevent increase of supply. You could flatten the old town and build Dubai-style 100 floor skyscrapers, creating >20k new flats. The only reason why this doesn't happen is legislation, zoning laws, building codes etc, which in turn reflect the will of the majority of the population who don't want radical change of cities.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by timthelion on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @05:47AM (#13704568)

In Prague it would suffice to start walking around throwing paint at tourists and smashing 14th century statues. That would get the demand down enough that normal people could move back to the center.

Edit: My point being, that buldozing the center and building high rises would solve the problem, not due to incresed supply, but due to decreased demand. There's a reason why Frankfurt and London are the only cities in Europe with high rise centers and its not the price of steel. There are pleanty of sky scrapers in Europe, but they always end up being some dead part of town that nobody visits for any reason other than work or sleep. I guess that just returns to my point about "real infrustructure". I think that in the US, you can't even really talk about the "center of the city" because people don't "go to the center" as a thing to do. People stay at home, or drive to the gym, or go to the movies. They don't "go to the center, stop to watch a movie, get out, walk around a bit, have dinner in the center." While all the time thinking of their activity as "spending time in the center" rather than "going somewhere".

[ Parent | on HN ]