But that’s beside the point, because this is a case about an unlicensed Airbnb. I don’t know what the laws are where you come from, but someone illegally turning their multi-tenant property in a residential neighborhood into a 24-hour motel isn’t someone I have any sympathy for.
Besides, Airbnb is no answer to the dearth of housing in any city. The lawyer is spouting facts. Those are 45 units that would be going to people who would live or work in SF and instead are used to price gouge visitors (relative to the going rent/mortgage rates) who want to save $50 on a hotel room.
I don't know. Maybe this is just differing philosophies of government, but when I object to the government exercising an authority that only it has, I consider that to be directly a problem with government. Obviously it's useful to look into who else influences the government's decisions, but the direct problem is the exercise of power.
Perhaps it should be. That certainly doesn't mean that it is. Do the people of Flint want their water crisis?
That's awfully idealistic! Sure, it would be nice if that were true, as a pure expression of democracy, but I've never seen a real-world government which actually met that standard.
>save $50 on a hotel
how the hell can you simultaneously be gouged and save money?
what makes the long term resident more deserving than the short term visitor? why should the rootless pay a subsidy to the rooted?
The rooted pay taxes, provide stability to a neighborhood, and are invested in the upkeep of their properties.
They also tend to be better neighbors than a constant flow of random people who may not care whether they make noise, or disturb others.
I certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel and had random people coming in and out at all times of the day that I'd never seen before.
Beyond that, these units drive up rental prices, and avoid luxury taxes which can benefit locals to enrich the owners of AirBnB.
In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident.
As for stability, I don't think we're in any danger of destabilizing major cities from lack of long-term residents.
>>certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel
This should be decided by the contract you signed with your condo association when you purchased the property, not an arbitrary intervention in private contracts and property by the city.
Also, would it make any difference to you if the steady rotation of guests were not paying? If not, why not make the rule focused on the problematic condition, which is a large number of different people visiting/staying, rather than whether there was financial compensation?
That's why we don't allow strip clubs next to schools. Because certain things should be in certain places and not others.
In this case, the people have stated by voting in representatives who've appointed officials who've created zoning laws that they don't want short term leasing without a permit in their residential neighborhoods.
And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.
Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.
>>And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.
That's a different topic. My point was that there's no good reason to assume long term residents contribute more to the tax base, given how much more tourists spend per day of occupancy.
But to your point: who said Airbnb means dodging luxury taxes? And why ignore the loss in tourism when you wipe out the low-cost accommodations market provided by home-sharing?
>>Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.
Remuneration from paying guests is not the only potential motivation for allowing a large number of people to stay at one's place in quick succession. The motivation should not be relevant if the problem is the quantity of people staying. Targeting remnunerated stays exclusively is biased.
Anyway aside from the larger political question, I think it's more practical to leave these decisions to individual condo associations. No need to homogenize policy in a diverse landscape.
If a government wants your land & they have the cash to pay for it according to some calculation, they can force you to sell via eminent domain. [1] A property owner that pisses off the government may not be a property owner indefinitely.
And while the skeptic in me sees "Property owners don't want prices to go down," I also see the other side now. San Fran wouldn't be San Fran even if we dug deep to have a ton of housing without ruining the view.
There is something to be said for not seeing a single police car until going South at night (or getting pulled over for going South on some street starting with an S "after 9"). There is also something to be said for living around people who can afford to live there (I can't, so don't take this as some elitist techie failing to check his privilige).
Feel free to stick all of us Techies in Gigantic high-rises in Dogpatch and Mission-bay to bring the housing costs down everywhere else (and stop playing these band-aid games with Airbnb)
The core problem is that SF property owners value their homes, communities, and property values over the inclusion of additional residents, and that won't change without stripping this constituency of their property and voting rights (which is of course untenable in a functioning democracy).
There's a bill like this every few years, and it always gets shot down. The latest is SB827, which was shot down, too.
https://slate.com/business/2018/01/california-bill-sb827-res...
In general, the problem isn't with people being unwilling to sell to developers; the problem is that even after the developers get the property, they are prevented from developing it in a high density manner.
Eminent domain is used daily in the US and around the world. It would literally be impossible to build and maintain a transportation network without it.
I have so many questions about what happens in that regional development council hypothetical with astronomically high housing prices and homelessness:
- Do you play benevolent city planner and let current residents in these low density zones stay, redevelop around them? This is already happening without much help needed from the city, hastening that seems to be a good way to add to the homeless population resulting from displaced families fleeing the inevitable raise in property value and therefore taxes, no?
- Do you play well meaning but forward marching city planner who has to watch families move out of their city acquired land and homes, sure probably with a check in hand and a pat on the back hoping they make it-when realistically the market probably, very likely (A) don't have room for them or (B) probably out of their financial range to even relocate to nearby neighborhoods?
I just don't see a path forward here for SF using eminent domain that doesn't come with some very painful outcomes that probably exacerbate the very problem it would intend to solve. An unforced error.
Perhaps I'm overthinking the conceit here, but it's an experience I've lived through, so maybe that explains why my eyebrow immediately shot up.
Who’s talking about that?
All you have to do, literally, is just stop actively preventing people from building apartment buildings. The market will have no trouble taking care of the rest.
Won't their checks be for fair market value of their expropriate property? So by definition, they should be able to relocate within the neighborhood?
As someone who's been on the short end of eminent domain for a freeway offramp in north LA, nope. The city tends to hire their own appraisers with their own way of looking at things. Considering that most eminent domain cases run through single family housing without existing homebuilder contracts with the city (at this point, we're talking homes before 1980), there are a litany of ways in which a city appraiser can devalue the house. Yes, of course you can hire an appraiser go to bat for you.
The short and sweet of it is that the city can use things like "you never applied for a permit to build this addition" or "your re-roofing was never replaced with high wind resistant (no joke) tar." At this point, we're talking multiple visits from an appraiser (assuming you can find one willing to deal with city bureaucracy), and lawyer fees to handle the entire case.
That doesn't even begin to address the emotional quagmire of the fact that they knocked on _your_ door. You'll probably need to need to talk to a counselor for that one.
It’s actually physically impossible to build housing at the rate that SF is growing. Even if you got rid of the politics. Even if there was unlimited land. The issue is that you literally cannot build housing at the skyrocketing rate of growth that SF is experiencing. That’s why this is a crisis, it’s essentially a mass migration to SF.
Good. Extra is what you need to stand up to SV clout
How do you propose convincing propertyowners to finance their own vertical construction?
I've always heard it was the owners, but as someone who doesn't live in SF, I can't verify.
This city attorney seems... extra.
You know what else frees up more housing units? Letting people build housing does. You know who is responsible for the housing crisis? The city is.