No, you just need to get AirBnB or AirBnB hosts to start paying their share of hotel tax, like they do in some other locales.

That solves one market problem (AirBnB has no level playing field with existing hotels.)

That does not solve the other large problem; most residents do not want to live in a hotel district with other tourists, and especially not as hallway or floor mates. And residents do not want new hotel builds or conversions competing with apartments. With traditional hotels this is solved with permits and zoning, but AirBnB is usable on pretty much all residential units.

This is solved by the hotel tax as well: if you want to decrease the number of tourists, raise the tourist/hotel tax.

Seems like we don't have enough hotels then. Let's build more. It'd make a lot of money for the government.

Governments don't answer to short-term visitors, they answer to residents. Quite frankly, it's a good thing that Venice or Amsterdam or Barcelona are not pursuing a Benidorm-style frantic race to the bottom for tourism.

Indeed. And those residents would be greatly benefited by all the extra tax revenue and business that they recieve from tourists.

They're aware of that. Judging by the article, they also don't really care for it, because it has so many downsides.

You just said the answer to the other problem: require a permit or business license to be an AirBnB host. Alternatively, "the market" offers annoyed neighbors another option: move.

The government responds to the will of residents, not short-term visitors. A ban is just the residents' preference to set the number of permits or business licenses for AirBnBs to zero. A government has no obligation to accommodate AirBnB.

Saying moving is an option trivializes how difficult moving can be, and is about as helpful as saying, "If you don't like the current president, why don't you just move to another country?"

I find banning AirBnB a lazy form of governance, much like open container laws. "This behavior is correlated with undesirable outcomes, so it is illegal irrespective of the actual result of the behavior".

The other argument I see is that it prices out locals. Sure, allowing someone to own a 6-unit building and rent it out as a de-facto hotel will increase housing prices. But allowing locals to rent out their apartment while they're traveling has the opposite effect - it makes property more affordable by increasing utilization.

Living next to tourists is unpleasant and unwanted, and is so because tourists don't really care about anything other than their short-term visit. AirBnB is not correlated with that, AirBnB is a direct facilitator of it.

Allowing people to rent out their apartment doesn't make property more affordable, it allows people to bid up rents with AirBnB income and it prices out people on the margins unable or unwilling to rent out their own home.