Also, it seems like this logic could apply to anything. Oh, you're building a Chipotle so that poor people can eat cheap food and earn money? Well that Chipotle takes up land, driving up rental prices. High rental prices means that people have less money and less of a budget for food. So the justification is: "San Francisco residents are so poor, they need the ability to become drive up prices and become even poorer!" But that seems a bit silly.

But I'll note that just last year there were a pair of ballot propositions where circa 2/3rds of voters rejected raising height limits for a big new project:

http://ballotpedia.org/8_Washington_Street_Development-Initi...

And having lived here quite a while, I'm sure it's not only wealthy landlords who are opposed to unrestricted high-rise development.

It's existing renters who are stopping new development. Long term renters have fantastic rates because of how rent control laws are written. And they want to keep their rent low (for themselves, new arrivals can get screwed), their streets sunny (instead of being overshadowed by high rises), and their neighborhoods not too crowded.

Exactly, how much of the city do you think AirBNB is renting out?

825,000 people, assume 2.4 people per unit meaning SF will need ~340,000 housing units with a population growth rate of 0.9% each year SF will need an additional 3060 units.

So if we get rid of every AirBNB unit SF could potentially meet 1/3rd of it's additional supply for 1 year. aka. big fucking deal, what are you going to do next year?

The thing that's not OK is when someone realizes they can rent out their place as a permanent hotel to tourists and get more income than renting it out to residents. So I think a first step is to stop the ability to convert a rental unit serving residents into a hotel for tourists. Then the more nuanced stuff beyond that will take a lot more debate.

And I think there's a good incentive there. I was very choosy about who I let stay, because I was letting them into my own home. I didn't want anybody stealing my books or breaking my things. For a unit set up as a virtual hotel room, I expect people would be less careful about guests.

But more directly answering your question, what you're talking about is coming up with a good set of regulations for virtual hotels. That's hard. We often solve similar problems through zoning. E.g., we don't come up with a zillion little regulations on exactly what should be allowed in an industrial area versus a residential area. We just put compatible sorts of use together, and then mainly trust that people will work it out.

I could see that it might not help, but does it hurt?

You could make the argument that increasing tourism, or increasing the available footprint of where tourists stay (ie not just downtown where all the hotels are) is beneficial. I would actually love to see legit bed and breakfasts open in many more parts of the city. As it is your hotel choices are basically limited to downtown and Fisherman's Wharf. But I don't think helping tourism in SF should come at the cost of making the city less affordable for residents.

By lowering the supply of long-term rentals, it would drive the cost up, which would incentivize the production of more long-term housing.