Some buildings won't take care of it (especially in situations where people are buying whole buildings to rent out), leaving their neighbors without much recourse without regulation.
I understand the argument for apartment buildings. If someone in your building buys/rents a unit, then puts it on airbnb, they decrease your security because strangers are going in and out of the building.
I do not understand the argument for an entire building. If I own a building, it should be my right to decide who stays there. As long as the airbnb guests are not throwing wild ragers, I don't see what argument the neighbors could have.
Most cities require hotels go through a permitting and approval process, usually in part to ensure things like security, parking, etc. are accounted for, and only allow them in certain areas zoned for such commercial usage.
Then you're running a hotel. And there are rules for that. Including zoning restrictions.
A whole rented building has the same problems (loud guests, people abusing shared spaces, etc) as a single apartment rented to short-term guests, but on a larger scale.
Yes, this will require some restrictions on how people can use their properties in some places. Keep in mind, though, that this arrangement is only possible with some sort of law or community regulation. Without this, any single individual can come in and deny this choice to everyone else living there.
I'd say that if it is very important to you to be able to short term rent your apartment or house, you should buy one in a community where it is legal. You should not impose this choice on neighbors who chose to live where it is not legal.
Not necessarily.
In some cases the ability to have tenants able to rent out their units will allow the landlord to charge more rent for that unit, because the tenant is able to offset the rent. That is good for the landlord, but not good for the other residents who are bothered by the short term rental activity. As others point out it can also add to an increase in rental costs by creating artificial price pressure since tenants can afford to pay more.
I think the discussion comes around to controlling people's activities within their homes and on their land. If you own a home no one should be allowed to tell you who you can and cannot have over to your house and what type of home business you operate.
If they want to regulate something, which may be necessary, simply enforce already existing regulations and policies regarding noise and disruption. Who is the local government to tell you for how long you can or cannot rent out your home to to someone. Are they going to crack down on renting out a loft to a student too?
So your issue is with zoning laws. So, if you buy a building in a zone that allows you to run an AirBnB-type business, would you be okay with the zone changing after you've made your purchase? Because your asking the residents of these spaces to accept the opposite.
> already existing regulations and policies regarding noise and disruption.
Many people believe that they have the right to do whatever they want, but only up to the point where it begins to interfere with other people's rights.
The rest depends on your definition of "interfering with other people's rights."
Someone could reasonably believe that subletting is well within the limits of his/her principle whereas noise is not. Others, meanwhile, could argue that both are violations of the principle.
The congress can.
[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
So ... if it is from other state and money exchange hands - you are under its authority.
The interesting question is, where do you draw the line at what should and shouldn't be regulated?
Community consensus, which as luck would have it, is fairly easy to come to on a local geographic level.
Unfortunately that's not really sustainable. For instance let's say the community agreed that you can turn your home into a noisy 24/7 tool and die shop. Now 5 years past and half of the neighborhood has different home owners in it (quick turnaround for moving half a community but I've seen crazier things). Now the entire community wants them GONE.
Do we say it's okay one year then a few years later go "oh sorry but you can't do your business here anymore"? Moving or even closing up could cost the business owner a substantial amount of money not to mention the loss of customers now not necessarily knowing they moved, etc.
Point being while I don't know where the line is for regulating and not regulating something I also don't think community consensus is a silver bullet.
Really not sure about a solution here.
The community originally says it's okay for 24/7 noise. Some of them move out and other people move in. They know when they move in that there is a 24/7 noise shop there, and they don't have much right to demand because they are the thing that's changed.
I've said it before: cities that care about their current residents should enact 2 limits: tourist zones where year-round full-unit, full-building rentals are allowed, taxed and regulated like hotels (yes, you run a business, you pay commercial property tax, in addition to sales and nightly tax). And then in the remaining residential zones, limit homestays to 40 or 60 days, regardless of whether they are owner occupied or not, with AirBnB collecting taxes and fees for the city and reporting all nightly counts to the city. There could also be complete homestay exclusion zones, but that can also be handled by condo/neighborhood association rules.
The regulation can be tailored to local desires and needs: number of days, requiring permits or just allowing anyone to operate, and requiring owner-occupancy during visitor stays or not.
Note that nothing prevents regular residences at resident-occupied tax rates in the "commercial" zone, just that buyers in that zone know they can convert if they want, but so can their neighbors.
As I said in an earlier post, I would like to trade my right to run a hotel out of my house in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that my neighbors won't do this either.
However, I certainly don't see why the preferences of people who live in largely SFH zones in the outer mission or outer sunset should govern north beach or the inner mission. That's up to them.
If there needs to be a noisy shop there, people will want it to be there. If there doesn't need to be one there, people will want it to move to an industrial zoned area. That's good for society.
Hotels are prepared to deal with problems that tenants may cause. Locks are re-programmable between stays. Security, housekeeping and maintenance people on staff. Etc.
In a condo building, any problems caused in the common areas are going to end up being the responsibility of the association. Which is generally going to be ill equipped and probably unwilling to deal with any issues since they are getting no benefit from it.
They should care whether your tenants behave responsibly, but then they also care whether you behave responsibly, so there's little difference there.
You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased. This is why {Walmart, Airports, etc} cannot just be built willy-nilly in residential neighborhoods.
Not disputing that; however, it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency). It shouldn't matter whether the residents are short-term or long-term, as long as they're held to the same standard.
> You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased.
It's NIMBY when those restrictions are arbitrary (in particular when they restrict things that don't actually affect neighbors, other than their sense of moral outrage) and changeable in ways that affect existing residents who haven't agreed and only bought into the old restrictions.
What happens when the next nightly renter is noisy? That person gets fined/told not to come back.
The punishment for one tenant acting poorly does not affect any other tenant, and so there is no global motivation to reduce bad behavior.
Whereas with a long-term tenant, it gets expensive/prohibitive really quickly to behave badly. Isn't that genuinely what we want?
I'll give a simple example. my aunt owns a house here in AZ, and one out in NY. Lives in each for 6 months out of the year (ish). When she's not there, she rents them out.
About a year ago, Verizon sent her DMCA takedown notices, and started their "warning" system (i.e. the step program or whatever it's called). I told her about the safe harbor protections, and she spoke to the tenant several times.
Literally, the only thing that stopped the tenant from torrenting was installing OpenWRT on the router and setting up the nftables/iptables to block udp traffic (only after talking to the tenant 8 times).
The only thing that can prevent some people from behaving badly is the absence of a chance to do so.
Zoning is already a solution to this problem, why do we need to solve it again? Only places zoned for business/tenancy should be acceptable places to rent.
Here's the thing, even this is an area where people will reasonably disagree.
For instance, suppose you have a couple of kids, and they build friendships with the other kids around your neighborhood. Let's say that a family with a couple of kids gets outbid on the house next to you, because the new buyer can price in the profits of putting 3 bedrooms full time on airbnb, whereas the family would be filling them with two extremely expensive young children. In this case, airbnb could end up turning a substantial amount of the SFH housing stock into hotels.
Kids are just one example of the ways people may wish to live in a neighborhood. Obviously, kids are not the only reason people might wish to get to know their neighbors and form longer relationships with them.
So these people would like to trade their right to put their house or apartment on airbnb in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Other people won't, which is why I support zoning laws that regulate tenancy length, but would prefer to see them kept as local as is practically possible.
What I firmly believe is that these zoning laws are reasonable[1] in some areas, and that people should not break the law and impose a hotel on a neighborhood that has democratically chosen to live under this kind of zoning regulation.
[1] There are clearly unreasonable neighborhood regulations that are not up to majority vote, and history is full of them.