Can I open a nightclub in my house?
What about parking? Can I pave my front lawn and rent the space out as parking spots? Or maybe put a dumpster there for local businesses to put their trash in?
There's a tree on my boulevard. Can I cut the tree down and park a truck on the boulevard?
I decided to run a grow-op in my house. When I turn the electricity on, the lights fade in my neighbours houses because the load on my grow-up is so much bigger than the equipment is designed to support.
Tough luck for my neighbours, correct?
Houston managed an impressive urban sprawl without zoning laws.
Imagine the mess that NY would have looked like if Manhattan was limited to single family homes. The city would sprawl across half of NY, NJ, and CT easy.
https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h...
Because infringing on people's right to do what they want with their property deserves a hell of a lot more scrutiny than it gets right now. Trying to centrally manage what can be done where doesn't scale. See SF housing prices.
>Can I open a nightclub in my house?
As long as it meets the standards that night clubs have to meet then sure. You're unlikely to be able to do these things and be commercially successful enough to subsity in primarily residential area.
>What about parking? Can I pave my front lawn and rent the space out as parking spots? Or maybe put a dumpster there for local businesses to put their trash in?
Sure. Just be aware that you might be on the hook if you do a half-assed paving job and the runoff affects your neighbors. Once again if you truly are in a residential area where this kind of thing is not appropriate you will have a hard time being successful enough at it to annoy anyone who isn't already annoyed by everything.
>There's a tree on my boulevard. Can I cut the tree down and park a truck on the boulevard?
This is more complicated because you get into right of way issues and the city usually has a pretty substantial right of way beside the road (sidewalk?) but sure, if none of that is an issue then feel free to cut it down.
>I decided to run a grow-op in my house. When I turn the electricity on, the lights fade in my neighbours houses because the load on my grow-up is so much bigger than the equipment is designed to support.
If the power company was worried about QoS to the other customers on the street they wouldn't give you the massive breaker you need for that operation. If the neighbors are really bothered by it they can complain to the power company and if they complain enough then it will get addressed. There is no need for laws for this sort of thing. Once again if you're really in a residential area you're unlikely to get that kind of service if you really are somewhere it would be a problem. The power company has internal rules about what service gets installed where (basically their own zoning) in order to ensure that breakers on bigger equipment upstream are not tripped during times of peak load.
Good luck finding anyone to live in that kind of neighbourhood by choice. If you have an area with zero controls, it quickly will become a race-to-the-bottom.
The kinds of people who want to live in a nice neighbourhood, and be nice neighbours, will go live somewhere else.
It turns out that people feel the same way about freedom to do what you like with your single-family home as they do about the freedom to drive a car without getting a license or being insured, and the freedom to drive on whichever side of the road you like, and the freedom to drive a vehicle without smog regulation or safety rules.
Most people don't want your freedom, because the upside of their freedom is greatly outweighed by the downsides of their neighbour's freedoms.
They'll all just go any set up gated communities where everyone buying a home must contractually agree to the neighbourhood's own regulations.
There's also nothing wrong with gated communities and in fact that would be vastly preferable to having a few rich people make everybody in the city abide by their own arbitrary regulations.
And that's fine?
If you're buying the property for any purpose other than flipping then ROI from the sale of the property itself shouldn't be a serious consideration. Either you're living there and sale doesn't really matter so long as you don't get shafted too badly whenever you do sell or you're renting or using it commercially in which case the cost to acquire is sunk and the returns from that should more than make up for change in value and whatever you get from a sale at the end is just a bonus.
> and doesn't affect tenants much if
> they hold the guests to the same
> behavioral standards as the original tenan
Because it is mostly used by rich property owners to artificial prop up the value of their capital investment, to the detriment of renters and people who cannot afford to purchase properties.
I don't think Airbnb really cares to do that... and that kinda is where the problems start in terms of what Airbnb is really all about.
It would be delightful if AirBnB were to be the exception, but as Reagan(?) said, "Trust, but verify."
Who does the verifying if we remove local government from oversight?
1. I don't think Airbnb cares to do it at all.
2. It would be a very hard job even if they tried to do it.
Also wonder how many of them structurally work to disrupt themselves into a sort of untenable situation.
Like can Facebook exist at its scale ... and not sell everyone's data or just behave as it does?
Can gig economy companies exist without grabbing into tips / passing risk off onto delivery people?
I don't know.
"If you can’t find the listing’s web address, enter the street address and we’ll try to locate the listing. In order to protect our hosts’ privacy, we won’t be able to confirm the existence of any Airbnb listings or follow up with you."
This supports your point and should be changed.
And the fact that they don't have a feature for this shows that they don't care. They just think that a few lawsuits here and there are cheaper than adequately dealing with community complaints.
That's because in the kind of "upscale but not too upscale" kinds of places where AirBnB tends to flourish conflict resolution is such a lost art that calling the police on each other is what people do.
Simple conflict resolution works great with reasonable people, but those aren't the kinds of people blasting techno and screaming all through the night.
It may even be that more often than not, it is people where simole interaction would suffice on an individual basis, but there are two factors that still weigh in favor of summoning law enforcement:
(1) The social context of one where any individual you deal with would lose face by backing down to anyone without compulsory power, and
(2) Even if the above was not sufficient to tip the odds to “most probably individual interaction will not be productive”, the potential cost of interaction with “coked up aggressive young men” or the like doesn't require a very high probability that that is the scenario before it becomes an unacceptable risk even if the expected net benefit of individual interaction is positive.
Why? The issue is between the homeowner and the community. The fact that they're using AirBnB or anything else is irrelevant. The homeowner is responsible for what occurs on their property, and the community has a right to set standards via HOA's, city/local ordinances, etc.
The communication path should be between the property owner and AirBnB to discuss issues with their private contracts/arrangements/deals.
They have made plenty clear that they don't really care about how people near the rental unit are affected. They will never make this happen unless "NIMBY impulses" put enough pressure on them to do so.
What I feel like is missing is a communication path from the community to the platform. Because people start by calling the police to complain it immediately becomes a legal and local ordinance issue. If it were easy to report abuses to Airbnb directly, or if local police were instructed to contact them, the platform could better regulate itself.