Let's take a moment and see the amazing things that can be accomplished with AirBnB and marvel at the things that we do to ourselves with regulation which could make things like this practically impossible. Stifling business and innovation, deadweight losses to society, and all that economics jazz. Great for the traditional hotel industry, though, and whatever lobbyists they have at City Hall and in Albany...

Yeah, it's amazing how one can make a lot more money by violating health and safety regulations. Upton Sinclair did a great piece about how amazing it is.

Your comment is incredibly relevant and insightful because the world is black and white and our current regime, which is perfect, is all that stands between us and _The Jungle_. So-called "sensible" reforms to hotel-related legislation and economic freedom in general will only doom us all to accidental cannibalism in our hamburgers.

Seriously, this is flippin' AirBnB, not the slaughterhouse industry. I only asked you to think about the costs, not to roll everything back. Is this a knee-jerk reaction to straw-man arguments which you happen to imagine coming from your least-favorite Republicans, or what?

You criticized regulation in general so I criticized lack of regulation in general. It's not a hard leap.

If you want a more closely related set of laws, look at tenement housing. The Jungle was not the only example of an industry that badly needed reform.

True, its easy to go this grasp for this argument in the abstract. Hell, maybe the way they do things in NY is corrupt. But in reality you're grossly oversimplifying a century of progress in public policy.

Labor laws protect the needy and powerless, taxes pay for schools and city services, permits keep us safe and hold businesses accountable if they fuck customers over or violate things like heath codes...

The problem is that it's hard to tell when value arises from the elimination of a deadweight loss and when it arises from externalization of costs. E.g. environmental regulation generates some deadweight loss in the form of compliance, etc. It also seeks to internalize inherent costs of activity that would otherwise be externalized. If we got rid of the regulation, a factory owner would see a small amount of benefit from the elimination of the deadweight loss, and a very large amount of benefit from being able to externalize the inherent environmental costs of operating a factory on the local community.

In the situation of AirBnB, the externalities are imposed on all the other residents of the building and the neighborhood who signed up for apartment leases on the assumption that random people would not be coming and going. The value that accrues to the AirBnB host is generated partially by the loss of value to his neighbors. So what you have is not a creation of value, but rather the opportunistic transfer of value.

Negative externalities are best handled by tort law. Let case law develop over time. Central planning (i.e. one law with 'good intentions') does not work.

Tort law works okay when the number of interacts are limited, but it falls down when you're talking about large numbers of people interacting. Ronald Coase, who is deified in modern conservative economics circles, said as much in his seminal 1960 paper on the FCC.

So I can sue smokers for polluting my air as I walk past them? How about my neighbors who play loud music at 4am? Oh, and that guy who urinated on the plants outside my apartment?

Hmmm. I'm not sure that it's so easy for courts to take on all these cases. I'm especially worried that it's too much burden on individuals to defend their rights. Maybe we should try to find a consensus on what's OK and have the police hand out tickets?

Okay, I don't want to drag HN into flamewars for the lulz, so... Man, all you guys, chill. I'm not saying let's all go anarchist hyper-libertarian on you, or say that no regulation has any purpose or any benefit. I'm just asking you to think about the costs we impose on ourselves with it - I think this is reasonable, because you're clearly doing a perfectly good job thinking of alllll the benefits already, as your responses have clearly indicated.

And this is a specific occasion to see the costs. Most occasions you won't get to see the costs. They'll be behind the veil of obscurity and all you'll actually see is a bunch of (possibly self-interested) Republicans talking about abstractions, if the costs are mentioned at all.

Perhaps now that we are better enabled by technology we can get all or substantially all of the benefits with fewer costs in the future? Then everyone can be happy happy freedom joy double rainbow all across the sky puppy-kisses. For srsly. :)

okay i'm done here. :)

Yeah, but what are the "costs" when AirBnB "moves in?" Expectations of residential building/neighborhood such as certain amount of traffic and noise, as well as neighbors who are relatively long term (in other words, you can get to know them--example may not apply in some cities).

Face it, AirBnB is just the next hiding place for illegal rentals after tax and zoning officials caught on to vrbo. I don't understand how so many people think that they can turn the property under their control (owned or rented) into a business without liability or regulation. Just write the word taxi on your car, pick up some fares, and see what happens.

The Chinese suppliers who provided all that terrific melanine-spiked baby powder said the same thing!

Why let such silly things as laws stand in the way of profit? Who cares if someone else gets hurt...

> though if the landlord had a hand in the operation I'd imagine it would have to be a legal business

Couldn't the landlord just up the rent? That way, presumably everyone would be happy.

I pay my landlord in cash. He doesn't accept checks. Though I suppose AirBnB does force you to accept credit card and that's a bit harder to hide.