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?