Tell me about it. They have failed to vote, just vote on the issue 3 times, it’s a cluster f!ck downtown & everybody but the City Council knows it.
For cities with Airbnb problems, are they doing anything to alleviate the shortage of affordable non-sketchy hotel rooms? I don’t want to ruin local rental markets for my own benefit, but I can’t afford the non-sketchy hotels in these cities, and it seems like there’s a market for what Airbnb was providing.
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Yes & No, San Diego is a proven under achiever for planning the future. We have zero housing being built for the average wage earner here, that’s how they solve issues in San Diego, they ignore them. If I had a 10 bedroom house, it would take 1 day to fill it with renters, non AirBnB renters. I have 1 extra bedroom and I rent it on AirBnB for the extra cash, plus I meet folks from all over the globe. It’s been a wonderful experience for my DearWife and I.
You can not solve a complex problem like Housing by creating a prohibition, it will easily go under ground, that’s a proven in So Cal.
With no clear leadership from the top / City Hall, I suspect we’ll all have to find a solution on our own.
Both my apartment and my parent’s house (retired boomers) are rented out as whole home places while we travel. And we travel a lot, but those weeks aren’t in one big chunk so the places can’t really be rented out to long-term renters. I also rent my spare room for extra cash, but don’t want a full-time housemate. We’re not taking anything off the rental market.
Airbnb is a great way to allow me to travel and to work the rest of the year on a community archive project that doesn’t really pay much, but is a totally awesome project that’s good for my community! So, while people seem to think that Airbnb hosts are greedy SOBs that’s definitely not always the case. For me, it means I’m able to do good work and still feed myself.
Toronto is also regulating the Airbnb market - you can only rent out your primary residence, have to get a license, have to have certain safety things, and can only rent out your whole home for 180 days a year (good for snowbirds and inveterate wanderers). I am happy with that balance and hope they enforce it so that the downtown condos are no longer Airbnb ‘ghost hotels’ and it opens up more places for long term renters.
Airbnbs that are just investment properties… well they kind of suck for communities. In cities with tight rental markets, they are a total blight. So regulation without totally getting rid of Airbnb is great IMHO.
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I don’t know anyone who rents out via airbnb here where I live in the UK, but rental prices still go up every year. It’s just the price of living in a city that lots of other people want to live in too.
Works perfectly well in Germany, see car industry. The German car industry is a law to itself depressingly comparable in its single minded mission & and damage caused to the NRA in the US.
Having just moved to Berlin after 20 years absence I am flabbergasted with what drivers get away with. Speeding is the absolute norm, considered a human right.
Well, of course. Mustn’t do anything to endanger the constant rise of house prices or, heaven forfend, cause them to go down.
Voters would riot - while at the same time moaning about how their children can’t afford to buy homes.
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I think Germany does still tend to think that buying laws is something you do under the table and is bribery. It happens but you’re supposed to do it in secret.
I think that applies to big cities everywhere.
In Toronto, there have been buildings where the owner has tried to kick out tenants to turn the place into a ghost hotel. Or people buying multiple condos just so they can rent them out on airbnb. Even scam-artists who rent condos, airbnb them, stop paying their rent and collect money while the eviction wheels turn slowly.
Airbnb is telling every legislator it can that the majority of Airbnb “hosts” are individuals renting out their principal residence while they’re on vacation, or “homesharers” renting out a spare room. And that’s true. But this carefully-chosen stat sidesteps the real picture.
In Toronto, while only 16 per cent of Airbnb hosts rent out more than one unit, those 16 per cent control 38 per cent of Airbnb’s total unit inventory. Over half of Airbnb’s local revenue comes from those ghost hotel operators. And to give you a sense of the scale of these “ghost hotels” that take homes off the market, the largest Toronto operator has more than 60 listings on the platform.
Don’t believe the pitch from Airbnb
Airbnb is Making Toronto’s Terrible Rental Market Even Worse
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Yeah, it was a petty dig at America. Buying laws happens everywhere, but I do think there seems to be a different scale of it in America, where the national legislature won’t pass laws that have 80%+ approval and are popular with both parties because they are too busy passing laws to make their donors rich.
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This is the weirdest sentiment. What exactly is bad about hotels?
There are often too many of them, in city centers, displacing housing and driving up housing prices.
The price of the cheapest hotel rooms is also, often, just out of my holiday budgets. Airbnb is usually cheaper and has more personality.
They serve a purpose that Airbnb only provides in the roughest sense. Many people traveling aren’t interested in staying in someone else’s house; privacy is something hotels provide that room shares don’t. Not everyone on the go is a broke college student. Complaining that hotels displace housing when they have a far better density foot print than a bunch of empty houses being used by absentee landlords as Airbnb rentals is very odd as well.
Just like saying “I don’t like taxi’s and the industry could use some disruption” doesn’t mean I agree with everything Uber does (I actually agree with very little Uber does), saying I don’t like hotels doesn’t mean that I think it’s fine they are currently being replaced by full-apartment Airbnb rentals.
The functionality they provide, privacy and short time lease, can only be provided by an Airbnb set-up that is exactly that. And hotels still have better space management in the context of land use.
Your personal preferences do not make hotels obsolete or bad.
“Bad” is quite a subjective word, so my personal preferences actually have a lot to do with that.
But that is besides the point, I said:
and
I never said hotels are obsolete (fewer doesn’t mean none) and also didn’t say they were bad.
I don’t see how a room in a apartment can’t offer the privacy you require and say can only be offered by a full apartment/house? If the bedroom, toilet and shower can be locked individually, is that so much worse then having them all clustered together and locked?
Yeah, for every rule there are exceptions (whole house rentals=exclusion of long term renters). In my city, there are a lot of ADU (auxiliary dwelling unit) buildings going up. Some of them contain mother-in-laws, some ex-convicts, some students, but the one on my block contains air bnb customers.
We walked through it when it was for sale (along with the primary dwelling unit) and it looked specifically built for short term rentals. All the heating/cooling was direct, no ducts or vents for example.
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