People often forget that locals are actually willingly choosing to host their places on these platforms themselves to make money. It's not as one-sided as you think.

You forget that the people who can afford to have a place to rent, usually are not the majority of the population of the place where the rental is located. I live in a city that was very welcoming to tourists before airbnb, and where locals are now starting to behave in a hostile way towards non-locals, due to the affordability crisis (myself included, I had a 70%+ rent increase this month). You can try to make yourself feel better by saying you're not the problem, but you are, and locals everywhere are starting to hate people like you. My advice, unsolicited as it might be, is to relocate yourself to near where you're working for, as it's the economy for which you are being paid, and continue building great software, but with the world (and not yourself) in mind.

Tourism is providing these local economies with money. Shoo-ing away the tourists is not the answer. They are providing significant money into some very bad economies, and in some cases such as resorts, hiring locals and paying them decent wages (I see this in Indonesia). I assure you suburban US does not need your money.

Tourism provides money to these local economies, true. But what airbnb, and digital nomads, did was to subvert these local economies to depend on the to survive, turning whole cities (some of which are world heritage sites) into amusement rides for tourists. Have you ever stopped to think what is life like for the locals who work in the resorts (to take your example), and can't afford to live nowhere near their workplace, having to commute for over an hour (in the best case scenarios) only to smile at tourists that become upset because they can't speak their language? It's lovely to say that businesses should pay locals a decent wage, but that very rarely happens, the "decent" is a very debatable number. And anyway, no one in the world needs your suburban US money, please keep it to yourself and your suburban US economy.

How does a “digital nomad” differ from a resident that works from home?

A resident that works from home earns a salary that is calculated according to the economy where he resides, whereas a digital nomad, tipically chooses a destination with a lower cost of living, while earning a salary that was calculated for the economy of his original whereabouts. The digital nomad creates inflation and makes it impossible for locals to live on their own region, while someone who works from home does not have that ability to tip the economy.

That’s not true. The Airbnb industrial complex is mature, “locals” renting out a spare room have been replaced by profiteers evading tourism taxes. Ethical tourism involves using locally licensed accommodation (which is mostly hotels).

Any money you save by using Airbnb is pushing the cost of your tourism onto locals. Pay for a hotel (or other licensed accommodation) or stay home.

I am an airbnb host, and exclusively rent out my own apartment on the handful of weeks per year that I'm traveling.

If airbnb was banned, my apartment would be vacant during that time. This would push tourists into hotels, driving up the cost of a hotel room, and furthering the affordability crisis since developers would see more upside in hotels rather than residential development.

I assume you’re joking but if you’re serious: hotels must go through extensive planning processes that include considerations for the local economy. Hotels provide jobs. Hotels do not increase the cost of living in an area and assuming local government is operating effectively, hotels should be a positive for the local community.

Residential development and hotel development is very different, both as a business and a practice. You would not choose to build a hotel in place of a residential building. That’s why Airbnb is so problematic: people are taking residential housing and turning it into a business.

There’s certainly some “ethical” Airbnb property owners but they’re a dying breed. If you’ve spent any time on Airbnb in the last few years, you’d see the majority of listings are for property specifically owned/rented to Airbnb it. There are public companies that are entirely focused on Airbnb.

Out of maybe the couple dozens Airbnb reservations I've made, only 2 that I can remember where for places that had a long term tenant living there and rented through Airbnb ponctually. Everything else was about half obvious disguised hotels (whole floor / building rented that way), or belonging to a particular but rented short term the whole year.

It just feels dirty to me now to use Airbnb, but that's not even why I stopped. It's now not necessarily cheaper than a hotel and with little recourse when you get a dud.

Sample size: 1

A single counterexample is thankfully enough to disprove a false statement.

It would only be a false statement if the person meant that it's true for 100% of the time, always, rather than some kind of majority of the time.

Which is the least charitable way of interpreting their comment and as such against hn guidelines.

Only if the counterexample is the majority. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

We Airbnb our furnished basement sometimes. I am not a profiteer evading tourism taxes, but a resident of the city and active on my city council.

So your assertion is not true for all Airbnb rentals.

Yes, you’re right, there are exceptions to the rule, but they’re few and far between. Compare the number of airbnb hosts with just 1 room rented out today vs. a decade ago and you’ll see that nowadays most hosts have multiple exclusive properties. You exist but you’re not representative.

So because there is a tiny minority that rents out own place ocassionaly then it means that what Airbnb does is OK? o_O

That’s a pretty big leap in logic. Can you walk me through how you got from “I rent out my basement occasionally” to what you said?

I’m staying in an Airbnb style holiday cottage at the moment. I hd to register and pay tourist tax when I got here.

Maybe the problem isn’t Airbnb, it’s your jurisdiction.

Mind adding your Internet details to the site?

Whoa. Travellers are now responsible for all political and macroeconomical decisions on all countries/cities in the world.

#shutdownTravelling

If locals would vote to relax zoning and simplify regulations we wouldn't have the crisis in the first place.

Locals are incapable of that because property owners are the majority of voters and unwilling to vote against their own interests. Furthermore, if one municipality solves its affordability crisis a ton of people will move there and gobble up the affordable housing stock. It’s a problem that can’t be solved locally.

> Locals are incapable of that because property owners are the majority of voters and unwilling to vote against their own interests

This seems unlikely to be true. Especially In the places where housing is most expensive. Do the majority of voters in NYC and SF own their house?

The places where housing is the most expensive are the same places where people who cannot afford housing are forced to commute from somewhere else. Commuters don't get to vote in the place where they work; they have to vote where they live.

People do commute from outside but they are irrelevant. Do you think more NYC residents rent or own?

They are not irrelevant. If they didn’t have to commute they would be able to vote in local elections.

Property owners vote at much higher rates than non-owners. Property owners are the only ones with the right to put up election signs. Property owners are far more politically connected than non-owners.

The surprised reactions from airbnb taking up housing stock are from people who don’t piece together what you describe. Basically if the airbnb is taking needed housing stock, why not just zone for more housing? Or regulated hotels that these days are able to compete with airbnb on cost once again? That’s never mentioned though, people just stick fingers in their ears and repeat “screw airnbnb” without thinking of penciling this sort of stuff out to its logical conclusions.

I'm sorry but what are you rambling about?

Barcelona for example is flooded with tourists and "nomads" and save for basically banning short term rentals and eradicating cancerous Airbnb there is not that much that can be done...

Is the problem in Barcelona that the ration of tourists to locals is broken (I agree it is and didn't like it there when I visited because of this) or is the problem affordability as called out by the parent comment? If the issue is affordability this can be addressed by increasing supply.

If the issue is simply too many tourists flooding the city and changing the character, it's a different point than I was responding to and I don't have any well-formed thoughts on potential solutions and causes.

It's both actually and they are compounding.

For the latter one there exists tourist tax that could curb a bit the overflood but AFAIR it was harder to enforce / collect with Airbnb and short term rentals (as opposed to typical licensed hotels and hostels) that only exasperated the situation by pushing more people to try to cash on the airbnb

If there is demand for a thing and its exceeded such that people who want that thing can’t get it, just make more of that thing. Barcelona should build like Tokyo does until demand is satiated. The solution exists, people are just generally in favor of how things presently look and feel like and fear the unknown, so policies on land use tend to reflect these feelings.

If you are a digital nomad you are still only occupying one space at a time.

Bigger picture though, there’s a major contradiction in housing around the world and that is that owners who tend to be older and more likely to vote benefit enormously from rising home prices and governments which collect property tax as a percentage of property value receive more revenue when prices rise. Both groups have grown to depend on perpetually rising property values and factored it into their long term financial plans. There are numerous ways this is achieved that vary somewhat from location to location but the result is the same. After years of housing simply eating up more and more of renters and new homebuyers income we are reaching a breaking point and governments are looking for something other than their own policies (which they have every intention of continuing) to blame.

Governments if so motivated have numerous tools at their disposal to reduce home prices, which all in all is probably easier than the reverse. There are a handful of governments which have successfully done this, but the ones that haven’t won’t do this because they’d simultaneously anger both property owners and recipients of government spending which would need to be cut.

In the U.K. there is no tax related to house prices, just relative prices. If prices double from 250k to 500k government doesn’t get any more money.

The fault is entirely with those who don’t want more housing built. The government can use this as a wedge issue and blame immigrants (the ones who work and pay taxes) rather than the wealthy retirees

I don’t think we disagree. The details do vary from place to place, but I think the overall dynamics remain. The established lot has grown accustomed to feeding on ongoing price increases in an unsustainable manner. Any changes that would make housing more affordable would disrupt their financial expectations in ways that are unthinkable to them, so they’re trying to squeeze every other option available.