It's not complicated.

These aren't people patrolling every apartment in the building (some of these buildings are huge). They're tenants who are noticing the actual externalities of Airbnb tenants.

Also, you can reasonably assume that boilerplate leases for apartment buildings forbid directly these kinds of short-term rentals. Most boilerplate leases require individual approval by the landlord for any sublessors.

Why aren't they binding on the property owner, thus disincentivizing owners from renting out the property?

How do you punish someone who breaks the rules for a one night stay?

People with long term leases can be threatened with eviction for breaking the rules, which usually carries with it pretty big expenditures of time and money for moving, finding another apartment, etc. People who show up with all of their possessions in a suit case and stay for 1-2 nights don't have much to worry about.

If you are talking about AirBnB tenants breaking rules set by the AirBnB host -- which is implicit in the rejected option of bad AirBnB reviews -- you file legal action for breach of contract.

If you are talking about other neighbors or the property owner who didn't consent to the AirBnB host, then, either they file nuisance complaints against the host and/or property owner or, if they are the property owner and the host is their tenant, they evict the host for violating their lease.

The fines can go the same place they currently go. I don't know where that is, or if neighbors receive any of it, but that is a separate issue that also applies to long-term occupants puking on your door.

Short term occupants don't have the same incentive to be neighborly because they'll be gone soon. And the threat of eviction is basically useless against somebody who's planning to leave anyhow.

The related theoretical construct is Prisoner's Dilemma as compared with Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Or in IPD-land, it's where ω is low (short-term rentals) versus high (long-term rentals):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation#Fo...

The incentives of short term tenants are irrelevant, because all penalties would be applied to the property owner. The working out of polite understanding still works fine. If short term rentals are causing problem, neighbors should urge the property owner to either stop doing it, or figure out a way to get better tenants.

But not all humans have practice giving detailed instructions to temporary renters on how exactly to behave so as to be indistinguishable from the actual resident. The property owner's absence breaks the key feedback loop driving the polite understanding. And further, as I already explained, the temporary residents have much less incentive to follow whatever micromanagement has been ordered. I understand that you think it's the same in theory, but people are living not in your head but in actual apartments.

Of course, we are treating short-term rentals just like we are treating other home-based businesses: we are regulating them. Zoning laws are the general-case solution to this, and some cities are applying them here.

> It's not complicated.

Everything is complicated when the government gets involved and starts inventing regulations.

Close quarters living like we have in major cities is a very delicate dance that involves building a relationship with your neighbours. Introducing someone not committed to that can absolutely cause huge problems.

Because they could be fined or otherwise penalized for violating noise ordinances, which apply just as well to short-term and long-term residents.

When I moved into my current SF apartment, I verified with the management that short-term rentals were forbidden in the lease terms, and that they'd be willing to take action against tenants who violated that clause. I have no desire to live in a building occupied by people who have no incentive to live in harmony.

There are long-term residents who hold similar views about not particularly caring to know or interact with their neighbors, and that's not against the law either.

(Also, does "quiet-enjoyment-type laws" sound like dystopian doublespeak to anyone else, or is it just me?)

For the record, though, there's nothing wrong with the owner of an apartment building prohibiting the renters or owners of the apartments from subletting them via AirBnB or any other means. It's perfectly fine for them to say "don't rent out your place or we'll kick you out". So if they want to construct an apartment building that caters to long-term residents who object to living near short-term residents, they can. And if they want to rent out their apartments on a short-term basis, or let their tenants do so, to the possible detriment of their ability to attract long-term residents, they can do that too.

Yes, the nature of living in a society with humans is that you sometimes have to take situations on a case-by-case basis, and cannot have a single set of rules that will guide you to correct action in all circumstances.

(Also, does "quiet-enjoyment-type laws" sound like dystopian doublespeak to anyone else, or is it just me?)

"Quiet enjoyment" is the technical term. Between the intellectually dishonest rhetorical device of calling something I said "dystopian" and your absurd assertion that one could use a noise ordinance against short-term tenants, it's pretty clear that you're not arguing in good faith here.

That's a very old and ongoing argument, between having a concrete set of potentially inflexible laws (which are particularly dangerous when they restrict the human capacity for understanding and forgiveness), and having the arbitrary and changing moral sensibilities of humans ("I'll know it when I see it"). Both have their own set of bugs. I don't think it's reasonable to universally say you cannot have a single set of rules that works everywhere, nor is it reasonable to always defer to collective moral sensibility (which often gets the wrong answer as well).

I do, however, think it's reasonable with either approach to limit outrage and sensibilities to what actually affects people, rather than proxies for that, or worse yet things that neighbors have no business controlling.

> "Quiet enjoyment" is the technical term.

I never said it wasn't, and I didn't intend it as a rhetorical device; sorry if it came across as such. I meant it as a genuine question; it seems like an odd term, compared to for instance "noise ordinance" or similar.

Gotcha, I interpreted that as you saying I was using doublespeak, rather than that the term itself was doublespeak-ish. Apologies for the misinterpretation.

Which sounds like a great reason to not have a rule prohibiting short-term occupants in residential zones.

I consider it to be a lubricant in the engine of law. You can't run law to the letter, because defining the law is an AI-complete problem. The law tends to have more corner cases the more detailed you make it, and by executing it unconditionally, with maximum efficiency, you're going to harm a lot of innocent people. On the other hand, too much grease, and the engine won't run at all.

That's why I often remark about the importance of trust on a societal level, and my dislike towards the current trend of replacing trust with trustless systems. Trust is what keeps society together, and what allows it to work without humans having godlike introspection and cognitive powers.

The organic nature of case-by-case resolution of issues pretty much requires a long-term tenant that has some for of long-term relationship to the property and neighbors. Social pressure and personal responsibility come into play.

It's the difference (roughly) between a teacher-student and a parent-child relationship. In the former case, the (usual) lack of personal ties requires explicit rules. In the latter case, a lot of rules and conflict-resolution is more organic and case-by-case.

Then that applies equally to short-term and long-term occupants. Of course, the point of the rules and penalties is to disincentivize the behavior, not just to have recourse after the behavior occurs. Assuming there is a reliable process of enforcing the penalties, and the penalties are set appropriately, they should function to sufficiently disincentivize the behavior.

Come on.

To choose a more permanent example - property damage. If the tourist damages the property, you make the property owner pay for repairs. OK. Maybe AirBnB can help the property owner track down the tourist to get the money for repairs, maybe not. But the point is that the damage still happened in the first place - a longer term tenant that faces their neighbours every day would be far less likely to have done the damage in the first place.

Well, that's a physical limitation. Arrow of time and whatnot. It also applies to all penalties. Of course, the point of the penalty is not simply to raise money or get revenge after a rule is broken. The purpose is to disincentivize breaking the rule in the first place.

Air BnB could allow you to enter your address on the site if you wish to report noise or disturbance. Without informing you who the occupant is or forcing you to submit personal ID beyond your unit or house number; based on your proximity to any booked Air BnB properties the nearest user would get a ping via SMS and if they continue to make noise the lessor gets a ping via SMS.

The ping would be done without letting the reporter know any information other than a nearby user has been notified. The lessor SMS could include the phone number of the lessee so that they don't have to go hunting for the details and can act on the information quickly.

You'd need to set it up in such a way as to prevent someone spamming the system with random addresses or ceaselessly pinging the lessee/lessor.

Faced with lack of efficient mechanisms, HOAs or city councils after hearing a few horror stories just throw the baby with the bathwater by outlawing all short-term stays, even if 99% of short-term stays are quiet decent non-confrontational tenants.

Sure there is: make the property owner ultimately responsible, if they're not already. Then watch how fast they actively seek out solutions that pass on more liability to the tenant.

> Faced with lack of efficient mechanisms, HOAs or city councils after hearing a few horror stories just throw the baby with the bathwater by outlawing all short-term stays, even if 99% of short-term stays are quiet decent non-confrontational tenants.

Yeah, most regulation seems to be reactionary in response to a small fraction of high-profile incidents. "How do we not make the news? How do we not get blamed?"

See also airport security.

Speaking from experience here, having been a member in an HOA with a smoking tenant nearby (nothing related to AirBnB, this was a long-term lease).

Oooh, I'm so scared of fines from a local authority in a town I'm visiting for two days and never coming back to again after I return to my own country on the other side of the world.

Long-term residents tend to have more of a need/interest in keeping the peace with their neighbors.

And speaking as a long-term resident who has no interest in local politics, like who leaves their trash bin by the edge of the road for a day after trash pickup, or whether grass is two inches too long, personally I actively avoid places with a homeowner's association.

Say this is happening to you: you're trying to sleep but the short-term renters next door are having a loud party, and although you already asked them to stop they ignored you. You lie awake fuming about it, but planning for how you would like to get the property owner fined isn't doing anything to stop the noise right now. Furthermore, even if the property owner is fined, then it's still possible that in 6 months time he'll rent the place out to some jerks who'll do the same thing. So, the property owner may get fined again, but the jerks don't care, because they're jerks - it's oin a stolen credit card, they're leaving the country, they're high on drugs and are incapable of realizing that this will result in bad credit, whatever. Do you want to go through the same process of filing a complain and eventually having the property owner fined every time this happens, or do you just want to get with your neighbors and say 'fuck it, no more short-term rentals in our building/street' at the next HOA or neighborhood meeting?

There are real objective difference between living in a building with short term vs long term tenants, and there is no easy way to force short term tenants to behave like long term tenants.