The choice of a community does not necessarily mean that it is the right choice.

Like NY Taxi Medallions. Before Uber, Lyft or other ride-sharing apps, there was only 13,587 yellow cabs in the city of 8.5 million people. Currently, there are an estimated 100,000 cabs in the city which resulted in a drop of medallion prices from $1.4 million in 2014 to just $140,000 now. It was an artificial bubble created by the taxi drivers community (and government) to keep the medallion price inflated. It is easy to see why they were against ride-sharing apps.

Or California housing zones. We all know that California has a housing crisis and one of the potential solution is to have multi-story buildings. For that, we need easy rezoning of residential zones to allow multi-story building redevelopment. However, most of the community members refuse to allow for that since it would bring down the rent and property prices. So the community is not interested in allowing easy development of multi-story buildings.

Before Uber, yellow medallion cabs were certainly not the only taxis available in NYC - they're just the only ones that can be legally hailed from the street. There have always been lots of car service companies in NYC that you can call to request a taxi. Some of these even offer online booking.

Breaking the law for a buck is a very different thing.

AirBnb definitely solves a problem and generally at a much cheaper price. We need to update our laws to let it do that in a sustainable manner.

Edit: Corrected rentable to short-term rentable

Simply false. These are the steps involved in "declaring" your property to be rentable:

Step 1a: If you rent your place, ask your landlord for permission. Step 1b: If you live in a condo building, ask your condo association for permission. Step 1c: If you own your own house, ask your spouse for permission.

Step 2: Put an ad on Craigslist advertising your rental.

Step 3: There is no step 3.

Declaring a property to be rentable is literally a trivial exercise unless you're going for short-term (aka "transient" or "hotel") rentals.

For example, if I own a single-family home, my ability to rent it out is restricted by zoning rules. I would have to look up the Certificate of Occupancy and potentially make changes if I intended to rent my place out. It could even mean involving an architect because the building would have to meet the structural requirements for a rooming house. There are lots of redtapes.

I'm not really sure there is a "problem" here. It's the locals who get to decide if their laws need updating or not. I'm willing to be a ton of Airbnb guests is not what the locals want.

It's certainly not the neighbors who want this.

I get what you're getting at but I'm not sure I see a good way around that. Folks who can't vote on local taxes, tax free? Everyone would just shop the next town or state over....

I think that's just too expansive of a view on taxation and representation to make sense.

Immigrants, even permanent residents, pay all the taxes and have none of the representation. Felons too (while in prison and up to 2 years after).

I have a feeling “taxation without representation” stopped being an applicable argument as soon as USA won the independence war.

Congresspeople represent all the residents of their district, not just the citizens. While non-citizens are not allowed to vote on their choice of representative, they are allowed to call their local congressperson and express their opinions on upcoming legislation, and can volunteer in political campaigns. Permanent residents are also allowed to donate money to political campaigns.

At least in CA and NY, non-citizens do regularly take advantage of their rights within the US political system.