Turns out claims Airbnb was taking houses out of the rental market were right

Re:Turns out claims Airbnb was taking houses out of the rent... by DoreenMichele on Saturday March 21, 2020 @10:02PM (#22652053)

We have lots of policies with adverse incentives and terrible outcomes. We routinely spend more money in the US on homeless services than it would cost to provide homes for free because homeless individuals wind up a lot sicker, etc.

It's not sufficient to show that this makes more money for the owner. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. If it costs the rest of the world too much, no, it isn't the highest and best use by any stretch of the imagination.

Edit:

See for example this hospital decided to just house a few people to lower its expenses:

https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/homeless-patients-get-n...

Please note that I am not actually for "housing first models" or free housing. I'm for market-based housing that makes sense. It's just a nutshell description of the problem space to note that just giving people housing can be cheaper than leaving them to fend for themselves.

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Re:Turns out claims Airbnb was taking houses out of the rent... by Dylan16807 on Sunday March 22, 2020 @01:42AM (#22653009)

So just to counteract the dead account arguing with you:

"The original study that generated so much headlines in the press said this was true for _temporarily_ homeless -- it would, in fact, be exorbitantly expensive to house _all_ homeless people."

Nonsense. Over 80% of homeless people on a given night are temporarily homeless. There's less than a hundred thousand chronic homeless in the entire country. $100 a week would be enough funding for a hotel, but let's drill in the point by doing the math for $200 a week. 90 thousand homeless * $200 * 52 / 320 million people. Final cost: $3 per capita per year to house every single chronically homeless person.

And that's not even getting into the strawman they made about forcing landlords to do anything.

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