The issue is that of trust; if you have a full-time neighbor (renting or owning), you generally trust that they will respect the building/neighborhood, and over time will grow to trust them as people. They're more accountable. When you have random people flowing in and out every few days, that trust is not there. For example, Airbnb guests won't go out of their way to be sure to honor quiet hours... why bother if they're just there for a few days and don't have to deal with the neighbors on an ongoing basis?

I absolutely love using Airbnb and prefer it over hotels in nearly every place I visit, but I won't pretend it's somehow good for the neighborhood or neighbors.

It's hard for me to respond to this, because personally, in I don't think I've ever met a single neighbour and never had "trust" to any of them - and if there was a noise above a certain level, I just called the police to deal with it instead of going out of the apartment myself. "Trusting them as people" even sounds weird because I don't even know who those people are. I guess it's a cultural thing.

Sorry but you are dead wrong. AirBnBs have a significant negative effect on the neighborhood, especially in highly touristic cities. People renting AirBnBs are much likely to be louder and less respecting than long-term neighbors because they don't have any incentive to care - they are just staying there short term and then leaving again. Making too much noise at night is illegal, but it is much harder to enforce that against tourists that spent a few nights somewhere than against a long-term resident of their own house.

In Amsterdam we saw this a lot, with "party tourists" staying in AirBnBs, getting home at 4 AM and then shouting and making noise constantly, effectively ruining the lives of the next-door neighbors. This is a huge problem, especially since Amsterdam has many old houses that do not block much noise. Imagine waking up three times per week at 4AM because your neighbors' AirBnB guests are shouting after coming home drunk/drugged from a party again. I bet you would not be very happy either.

Unlike in the US, though, thankfully the government has cracked down very hard on AirBnBs. It is now illegal to rent out your house/apartment on AirBnB for more than 30 days a year, and people renting our their apartments on AirBnB must pay high tourism taxes to pay for externalities. It is also only allowed to rent out your primary residence, you cannot rent out a second apartment or house. People trying to circumvent these laws are cracked down on hard and have to pay extremely high fines (more than €10K). Home owner's associations and rental contracts now also typically have clauses that explicitly forbid AirBnBs. Still, many people want to introduce more rules or even ban AirBnB entirely.

> Professional Airbnb investors buy up whole properties

Not in NYC. Here they violate both the law and leases/condo rules to Airbnb units they bought or rented under false pretenses. Airbnb knows this and doesn’t care. It’s not about the free market, it’s just another swindle.

>run them as a hotel

Unlicensed hotels, mind you.

>What toxic waste, exactly, do Airbnb listing dump on their neighbours?

There was a massive issue in my town where students would rent airbnbs and party, keeping neighbors up when they had to go to work the next day. Police were having to attend to more and more incidents.