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.