This is true in lots of fun cities, primarily because it's so hard to build new housing stock—which is a Bad Thing, as Matthew Yglesias describes in The Rent is Too Damn High. Britain is suffering from a variant of the "no building" problem too: http://www.buzzfeed.com/dlknowles/britains-dysfunctional-pro... : "Construction started on just 107,000 new homes in England last year. Excluding World War II, that’s the lowest figure since the 1920s."

The solution to "gentrification" and what not is "building new dwellings," which we know how to do very effectively (elevators and steel are century-old technologies). The problem is regulatory / political.

I do think we're chronically underbuilding in a lot of places (SF being an extreme example), but the existence of steel and elevators is not a panacea for the "gentrification problem".

Well then, less allure would lead to lower prices, right? What's not to like?

Because the world does not exist for the benefit of the rich and privileged; not simply the "rolling in Maserati" rich but those in a position to enact those gentrifying policies--who are overwhelmingly upper-income and capable of exerting more time to get what they want, have more money to apply to their causes, and generally are better-educated and able to execute.

The "selfish vote" amongst the privileged is indeed a problem. A lack of social responsibility and a refusal to understand that those unlike you must too be able to live are moral failings. They are wrong, and situations that increase the effectiveness and value of the selfish vote amongst people with privilege are undesirable.

No? Does it exist for the benefit of the poor then? -They sure keep voting for more wealth transfers and taxes on the rich, and they keep getting them too!

Note that I'm just an ordinary middle-class white person. I just wanted to point out that the world does not exist for any group's benefit. We're all just people, all just individuals here.

No. But we have ample historical evidence that huge wealth and privilege disparity does not lead to societal stability. The selfish vote of those rich and privileged seeks to increase this disparity. The selfish vote of the poor does not.

I don't think I've ever seen an example of this reflected in prices. Do you know of any, or of any studies of this phenomenon?

It's sort of a Bavarian themed down-town and city in Washington state. Its allure and attraction to tourists depends on its theme.

I say I don't know if it's a great example because I have no direct evidence about prices, but I assume the reasonable volume of tourists and business must raise prices compared to other cities.

If you don't end your contract, your rent is going to stay quite low in Berlin. If you're retired or unemployed and living decently with a rent around 100€ per month, it's not so easy to escape from the apartment. With a new contract, the rent might be ten times more expensive. Or the place is renovated and put into Airbnb.

People in general here in Berlin don't want more hotels. Especially for the residential neighbourhoods which makes all the prices go up even faster. Too bad some of the neighbourhoods are also very 'hip' places to stay...

Berlin has been gentrifying ever since they tore down that wall. You can still buy apartments in East Berlin for under $100K.

In NYC there's an enormous arbitrage. The cheapest hotel room in the city is $300/night. Meanwhile, you can rent a 1BR apt for $2,500 / month.

So you rent an apt for $2,500 / month and book it out on AirBnB for $200 / night ... and you're looking at a monthly arbitrage of $3,500.

The guy I know heard about it from a friend who's already doing this with 6 apartments ... so he was making something like $18K / month (less the cleaning expenses).

Airbnb is clearly forcing a convergence between hotel prices and rents. This doesn't just mean forcing hotel prices down, it also means forcing rents up.

I wish the tech community could stop reflexively defending airbnb and engage with the question of what the costs it is imposing are or might be.

I responded to this issue here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657242 , but the short answer is to build more units.

Building the Second Ave Subway, extending express bus service, and doing similar things would also be helpful.

A way to game this might be to:

1) Buy a place

2) Rent out 1 room full time to someone who agrees to #3 in exchange for below market rent.

3) Rent out the other room or rooms.

People might lie, but there is going to be some immediate negative feedback when people find out they've rented out a couch...

Also, NY specifically worries that it will change the local housing market. If investors buy up enough local properties and turn them into mini hotels, locals may be priced out of these neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods will in turn suffer.

Plus there are the complaints from the locals. Having a neighbour rent out their place to tourists a couple of times a year is not a big deal, but if it happens every single week it gets annoying. You never know who is coming and going and they aren't always all that worried about noise, garbage, etc.

And just to clarify, I think the state is right to be concerned about these issues. But at the same time I would hate to lose the ability for someone to put their primary residence on a site like Airbnb a couple of times a year. This helps visitors and the residents without significantly hurting anything else in the equation. Things only start to turn sour when enough people create dedicated Airbnb properties as investments.

Edit: NY get's 10$ on a one room 140$ hotel room stay as it's $2.00 per day per room* + 5.875% of the rent. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/business/hotel.shtml

I think that there is a clear difference between renting out a room or occasionally renting your entire place, versus keeping a separate apartment strictly for renting out on AirBnB.

EDIT: I was sort of surprised that was the first zoning, when I just looked it up. I always mentally associated zoning with 1920s progressive social engineering.

New York passed the first US laws, as far as I can tell from a quick search (although I do see vague references to San Francisco using zoning laws against the Chinese in the 1880s, and a lot of people, including Wikipedia, quoting a more limited achievement of 'the first comprehensive/city-wide zoning laws' for New York), but Europe definitely predated them. I believe Germany and some other countries also had them, besides France.

[0]: http://books.google.com/books?id=dONVGtJzxrwC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA...

But really, the whole idea that AirBNB should be able to ignore established zoning is another example of why I consider the "sharing" economy to be the "taking" economy.

Sharing space peacefully is exactly what zoning is aimed at.

These are all new builds in the past 8 years.

But of course, most systems are not so well-behaved, so that is only a lead-in to the real examples, where you change the setup slightly and suddenly analysis grows more complex. Now what happens when you push lever X depends on what region of the state-space you're in! And sometimes pushing lever X can change the region of the state-space you're in, too! There is feedback and internal dynamics. I see very little libertarian economics that displays even a 101-level understanding of any of that.

To be very brief, you seem to think that libertarians believe, roughly,

(1) "the world is simple, so we should have simple rules."

Instead, you suggest:

(2) "the world is complicated, so we should have complicated rules."

But this claim is entirely unresponsive to:

(3) "the world is complicated, so we should have simple rules."

which is what most libertarians I know actually think. If you respond to (1) when your opponents are arguing for (3), you will not have productive conversations.

I don't like to psychologize people, but I wonder whether this attitude is a sort of mental heuristic on the left, which often finds itself fighting with folks on the right who seem to believe, roughly, that regulation is intrinsically bad, and should be abolished. This has encouraged the counter-formation of the view that regulation is intrinsically good, and should be preserved. I guess that's a little easier to remember than the subtler view that regulation is intrinsically bad, but should sometimes be preserved when it can still improve outcomes over the status quo.

It's almost as though you have to examine things case by case and decide whether a dangerous tool should be applied, instead of just forming a mental affiliation with it.

I don't like this kind of thing as a customer, either. When I look for a place on AirBnB, I expect it to be someone's actual house/apt, which they treat as their own, because they also live there. If that's not the case, it should be made really clear up front.

Now, any decent hotel will be doing periodic checks for bedbugs around the box spring and headboard, and any other wooden furniture. But there will always exist a small chance that the last person to be in the room brought a couple and you will get them.

Good news is they don't transmit any disease, and if they bite you, it just itches for a few days and goes away.

But the more worrying part is that it drives up prices as more and more do this (not talking 1-2 appartments in a neighbourhood, talking increasing).

Another issue is the housing situation. In many larger cities it's a real issue that there aren't enough places to live as needed.

For hotels it is bad, as it's driving business away.

So, from both sides of the spectrum this is bad. For people looking to get some extra cash (not saying it's bad - as the post also mentions, it's an active investment), and for people looking for a place to rent while on vacation, it is good.

You could probably argue that they are most peeved about not getting the hotel taxes.

As others have pointed out, residential zoning laws aren't generally the product of corporate malfeasance. Usually they are there to help combat it. That's what NIMBYism is all about.

I probably wouldn't care because there would be no way to detect if it was happening, without me standing outside my door all night like a sentry.

Sure, I'd be annoyed if some of the guests came and went at all hours of the night and that was waking me up regularly, but that could happen just as easily with more permanent neighbors, and I'd be able to do just as little about that.

Not saying i agree, but that's the main motivation behind of Airbnb regulations, in NY and other places.

If there's one thing I've learned in my old age, it's that I love buying things for people. Because then the power dynamic is in my favor: this is my city, enjoy your visit but leave no trace.

Some tourists would prefer to support the town they're visiting by directly paying shop owners, etc, instead of having "hotel taxes" of indeterminate destination tacked onto their expenses.

(But you're right, using "kickback" was needlessly offensive.)