> They could solve this problem overnight with their software

Can you expand on what the software solution would look like here? I'm curious why the hotel lobby doesn't scrape Airbnb and report all the properties that are breaking regulation.

Eliminating all listings without a host present would solve 99% of these problems. That's what the site sells itself as, anyway. Problem is there isn't much money to be made there.

Or just do a tiny bit of host/property verification. Again, too much money to be made from illegal/unzoned hotels.

I see. So, the legality of short-term rentals in NYC hinge on the presence of the host during the rental. And, that's not easily detectable by just scraping Airbnb.

I still think it'd be straight forward to scrape reviews off Airbnb that have telltale signs of the host not being present e.g. lockbox mentions. Filing complaints/lawsuits against even a small minority should create a chilling effect for everyone else who's running illegal hotels.

Or, in a high density environment like NYC, prediction from scraped listings plus an actual person who verifies the host's absence and records it. Work on contract for... "The hotel industry consortium", idk how that works. It sounds fun if the market is big enough

All or very very nearly all host not present rentals in NYC are illegal. That the software allows such listings is evidence that Airbnb doesn’t care. I suspect rather the opposite that they value the revenue they get from these illegal transactions.

People using it would beg to differ. Just don’t use their service.

It harms communities by allowing housing inventory to flow to where the demand is most intense?

No, it harms communities by turning apartments into hotels. Hotels have externalities, which is why they're zoned.

Dense, multi-use blocks are part of the magic of New York. And there are hotels comingled with residential buildings all over the city. I'm not saying tenants should be free to violate their agreements with landlords, but these uses of Airbnb are solving a problem that city laws have created (an extreme lack of housing and hotel supply). I blame those city laws as a root cause. Putting supply on Airbnb is just water moving around obstacles the laws have created.

These people didn't just "commingle" hotels alongside other buildings; they implanted hotels into apartment buildings. That is definitely not a norm in NYC.

I'm with you that if they were doing that in violation of their lease, then it's wrong.

It had to be in violation of their lease; it's unlawful to do that in NYC.

There are externalities, though, to running a hotel, which is why we have taxes and rules to mitigate those things. These people are trying to bypass these mitigations, and push the externalities back on the populace. That is not ok.

One distinction I should have drawn is between running an Airbnb with a landlord's permission (or as a landlord yourself) versus doing it in violation of other agreements you have (like with your landlord or co-op board or whatever). If you're violating contracts, then yeah, you shouldn't be doing that and other people in the building have a right to be upset.

But if you own the building and are running it as an Airbnb hotel, I don't know that it's a self-evident fact that you're putting significant negative externalities onto your neighboring buildings. I can imagine negative externalities, but I can also imagine plenty of positive ones. These are exactly the kind of calculations that regulators are empirically horrible at making, even when they have the best intentions (and often they don't have even that going for them).

The ban on short-term rentals is a ban on a use of property which is provably very valuable to the people on both sides of those transactions. Banning that use destroys value for both those sides. The objection is that short-term rentals divert housing stock away from long-term renters, but that's not a problem with short-term rentals (which are, as we can see from the fact that they're so popular, an even more in-demand use of the property than long-term rentals), it's a problem with the low supply of housing. Which is a problem caused by the very regulators who are riding in to "save" renters from Airbnb.

Taxes on hotel stays are popular with politicians because the people who pay the tax aren’t typically residents. It’s more likely that these taxes were an easy sell rather than something that offsets a negative externality of having a hotel nearby.

I guess it is "housing" but I think you'd find a lot less housing as in traditional places you can rent or buy long term, I belive we're already seeing that with Airbnb.

Then you've got even more housing problems.

I

The community generally wants extremely restrictive building regulations. We're currently going through this in Edinburgh, which is a world heritage site as well.

An extra complication here is that the communal stair wells of apartments are comunally owned, so landlords attaching keyboxes outside the door are usually violating the property rights of their neighbours.

And, not or.

NYC seems to have quite a bit of new development.

Actually not, compared to cities like Chicago.

The same could be said for all foreign realestate investment where homes sit empty. (Granted that could be solved by a vacancy tax.)

But people already buy places and rent them out as income property. This puts a burden on renters and increases the incentives for builders to only construct larger apartments and homes. It raises the price for everyone and poor single people suffer the most.

Im not following how airbnb is worse than individuals who have profited off the community and neighbors since forever?

Because renting != hotel. There is a huge different between how a tourist treats a building/apartment/neighborhood and a resident does. There are many good reasons why hotels have regulations. Mini-hotel platforms are not subject to the same things.

All of the laws regarding noise, littering, loitering, smoking, etc. don't magically vanish. You have the same recourse against a renter as you would a tourist.

> All of the laws regarding noise, littering, loitering, smoking, etc. don't magically vanish.

The guests do, though, which means when you call the cops again next week, it's a new person getting their first noise warning.

So these apartments and condos don't have rules where you just complain to management and they kick you (the leaseholder) out?

Plenty of landlords won't want to do battle with the lucrative tenants who've rented out half the building and always pay on time.

Nor do they really want to do all that work - evictions cost money, and are hard! - just to have another AirBnBer sign the replacement lease.

Simply not true, at all.

If only there were some way, a technology, even, of increasing the total number of units on a given plot of land, such that those who want to live in a city or visit a city wouldn't have to compete so vigorously for livable housing units.

Alas, we can only dream that such a technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_frame

The interesting thing about AirBnb is not in the raw space consumption, but that it's driven down the cost of hotel rooms by changing what "hotel" means.

Is your argument that tall buildings are not built in NYC?

They obviously are, but there are still not nearly enough. If you walk through lower manhattan you see innumerable 3 and 4 story buildings.