> Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one of the strictest bans on holiday apartments - many other European cities also have some kind of regulation.

The problem with housing is that the supply is very fixed. A unit that's taken off the market to become a full time AirBnB is one that's not available as a rental for a resident of the city anymore.

There's an argument to be made for private property rights, but the further trouble with real estate is that it's often made as an investment, and like other capital, it tends to be reallocated disproportionately over time.

While it might seem obvious for someone to be able to rent out their vacation home part time, it's much less so that an owner of 15 units in downtown San Francisco should be able to hire a property manager and rent them all on AirBnB full time — given a sufficiently enticing city for business/tourism, eventually there won't be enough stock for the locals anymore (or more accurately, the upwards pressure on price will make it unaffordable for nearly everyone).

Another contributor is poor transportation infrastructure, which limits peoples' flexibility, creating more pressure on housing near train lines and stations, etc.

(I'm the grandparent.) Yes, this. I'm all for new construction to improve supply and a streamlined bureaucratic process so that it can happen more quickly.

Practically speaking though, you can look at any city that's had a problem with AirBnB (Berlin, San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, etc. — pretty much anywhere desirable to visit) and new stock isn't coming online anywhere close to quickly enough to counteract the market forces introduced by AirBnB. As it stands today, building is a very slow process, and it's likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

From that quote I would say vacation rentals are being scapegoated. Rents are rising with one of the strictest bans on holiday apartments.

Affordable housing was a problem before AirBnB was ever conceived.

But AirBnB is contributing something to those rising rents, and unlike the desirability of your city, it's something that you can control for.

I (along with probably most people that share a similar position) would argue that regulating AirBnB is good, but not adequate. Pretty much every large urban development in the world (SF, London, NY, Berlin, HK, etc.) is experiencing the same problem that because they're desirable they're also automatically unaffordable. We need to figure out how to put roofs over people's heads by building much more, and much more cheaply.

This claim seems to be the root of every anti-AirBnB argument: AirBnB rentals eat into the resident housing supply.

But this is simply solved by zoning and regulation. In any given city there is some number of residents and some number of visitors, and some number of permanent and temporary beds for them to sleep in. Yes, AirBnB shifts some of the housing stock from resident to visitor - but, if that's what economic forces are commanding then the zoning & regulation should adapt, not fight it. It's not a capacity issue, just one of allocation.

Not for those that suffer from it.

>There is some number of residents and visitors in any given city, and some number of permanent and temporary beds for them to sleep in. Yes, AirBnB shifts some of the housing stock from resident to visitor housing, but, that's really just a zoning and regulation problem, not a capacity issue.

Well, unless people en masse are willing to go out there and build new houses, and prefer to use them for resident renting instead of AirBnB, it is a capacity issue.

Capacity doesn't magically increase with demand in the real world. Especially if there's a big, more lucrative, sink for new capacity.

They ARE! But the government won't let them.

Zoning and NIMBY laws are what causes the housing crisis.

It would be fixed in 5 years if the government removed building height limits in only a few square mile areas in all the major high rent cities.

The problem of high rent prices is solved by allowing people to build a couple hundred thousand apartments in every major city.

Apartments are extremely lucrative, so any developer at all would be willing to build them.

Plus, they're hardly inevitable: they're created by humans along with whatever rules and mechanisms they operate by, and they're administered by humans. What self-organizing features markets have are confined to a subset of what they functionally mean: they scale because they semi-efficiently find optimal answers through working on populations rather than centralized control. What does 'optimal' mean? That's sometimes in open conflict with the very rules we want to see honored.

It's a neat hack, but horribly inappropriate to some aspects of life. And we get in real trouble when we start redefining everything in life circularly, as 'what is produced by markets is optimal'.

Human extinction is an optimal market solution to some things, including maximization of capital as an abstract measure.

It's a problem for me that regulation and zoning increases the cost of living.

Now we're even. :-)

To make more money renting short term than long term you have to be in a very desirable location in a town/city with a lot of tourist traffic, and you have to keep your labor and energy costs down ruthlessly.

Most cleaning companies want $30 an hour. You need to pay $120 to do a turnover. Plus you need to buy many things and replace them regularly. And you need to pay for utilities.

Unless you can book for high prices, at least $250 a night and more like $399 a night on weekends in season, and keep the calendar pretty full, its not worth it.

I moved to San Jose last year and could not find an affordable place to live long term. I got incredibly lucky finding a place on craigslist for $600/mo but discovered one month later that it was because the landlord was kicking everyone out in another 2 months so he could give the house to his mother.

There was so much competition for places to live that I couldn't find another apartment for under $1000.

I ended up moving to an Airbnb that was $25/d. At any time I was living with 6-12 other people, host included. 14 beds total -- 4 bedrooms with 1 or 2 bunkbeds in each room and the host's (and gf's) room with a double bed, which he would occasionally share with a guest. I would have never expected that to be a good experience and would not have signed up for long-term housing like that, but I actually loved it and stayed for a year.

Point is, Airbnb lets you cram more people into a small living space than someone renting might be willing to do, so in big cities you can make the argument that though Airbnb reduces supply of housing, it also reduces demand for housing so there might be a total sum of more housing available

So, from me: please don't try it.

The reality, of professionals renting out multiple apartments for the whole year, is when the neighbours will complain: there's the noise of 50-100 people clunking their wheelie suitcases in and out, not knowing where to take their rubbish and leaving it in the stairwell, having a noisy party, etc. Plus, a feeling of reduced security when there are unfamiliar people in the building all the time.