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.