They have more affordable housing than the US as a whole (59.4% of homes sold vs 57.7% overall for the country). It has always been very affordable there, probably because land is not scarce.
There is always an interplay between housing costs and rental costs. If one is more expensive than the other, people will choose the cheaper one until there is parity again.
But in general, we always feel like there is a shortage of cheap things.
My goodness, what is there not to like about AirBnB?
I think this is upsetting regular hotels. Because them have fire hazard regulations and food safety rules to follow, asking permits, getting surprise OSHA or equivalent visits and so on and are getting these unregulated rooms with less expenses and more allowance for tax evasion.
I think transform these apartments in brothels will get more profits than simple short term rental, by the way. SO the next step will call a madam?
Once the economy collapses the citizenry won’t have spare cash for frivolous travel, so the building will be ripe for slum tenancy. Despair finds a way.
I think it’d be interesting to track bedbug levels in a city, and see how well it’s correlated with unlicensed hotel rooms. I know that the larger chains and responsible independent chains keep an eye and have strategies to combat them, but I would think the less regulated more amateurish places would have more issues.
Hell, if that happened to me and I were evicted I would definitely make them move my guillotine for me.
Absolutely!
But turning apartments (with long term tenants) into unlicensed, vacant-more-often-than-not, hotel rooms serves only to distort that relationship and generally drive up prices for housing.
Housing is a human need, a necessity only a step behind adequate food and clean water. To treat it as just another asset class with which the wealthy can play speculative games is to invite revolution.
One possible way to avoid this practice is to look for airbnb/vrbo stays that are shared rooms with the owner present instead of renting a whole place. You lose privacy to some extent, but protect against the loss of housing.
the lure of riches can turn anyone into a scumbag, even people we love.
Don’t zoning laws come into play somewhere along the line? (short term rental vs year long leasing) IDK - just asking.
I wouldn’t call him a scumbag at all, he still has plenty of conscience. Didn’t take it that you meant it that way tho.
He just used to be a lot goofier and more down-to-earth but business school definitely changed him.
His own closest friend agreed with me but I don’t know if there’s anything we can do at this point. I think my brother is a registered independent but he puts off a young Republican vibe of Ayn Randian airs… Ehhgh.
The AirBnB evictions are a perverse incentive, but it doesn’t even take that to cause landlords to be, IMO, sociopathically greedy. This one in the Bay Area is evicting an 87 year-old Holocaust survivor - raising the rent on the 2 bedroom Alameda apartment to $3200 wasn’t enough, so she decided to add straight up eviction.
yes certainly wasn’t saying that your brother was a scumbag! who would do that? i meant in the general sense. i too have a brother that has by his beliefs has estranged himself from the rest of the family. a good guy, a family man and a nice circle of friends. what happened to change him to the family has remained unanswered to anyone’s satisfaction. but the estrangement was his choice, not ours. so i feel your anguish about your situation.
Her defense of her actions is disgusting. She had a choice, and she chose profit over her humanity.
She seems to be in denial of what “greedy” means.
It exacerbates an already dire undersupply of affordable housing. Ideally, AirBnB allows people to rent out their homes when they aren’t using them. The reality is, most of the AirBnB stock is otherwise vacant property that could be occupied by people who actually need it.
But the market can bear it, so it’s okay, and in fact moral. The market is the ultimate arbiter of our morality, after all… /s
People should probably read this:
Gets to not only the realities of gentrification, but also the mindset that excuses it, which is primarily about profits before people.
I look at these people in the same way I look at an addict. If they haven’t hit rock bottom yet, they’re probably pretty excited about that Saturday night Rave/Monday Morning Status meeting, and nothing you’re going to say is going to change that. They won’t come around until they want to come around.
My father is a Trumper (ugh) and I’ve had success telling him that If all the people are dead because no one has healthcare, it doesn’t matter how much money anyone saves/spends. Basically, if no one is alive, then money doesn’t matter. That finally clicked with his lizard brain somehow and he’s more open to the discussion, if not the solutions.
It’s true that it is a basic necessity. But this outcome doesn’t mean the tenant becomes homeless. They don’t owe the rent anymore. So… they can move into another rental unit. In Phoenix, there are hundreds of houses and apartments for rent, many for less than $1K/mo. It’s inconvenient, I’ll agree with that. But the tenant knows that when they sign a lease, they aren’t getting the right to live there forever. In the vast majority of cases, a landlord will extend leases to tenants that want to stay in the unit. I helps the landlord avoid vacancy and lost profits.
But in some cases, the market changes and a more profitable opportunity is available. Why shouldn’t the owner of the property be allowed to participate in that? It works the other way too. If a tenant’s lease is about to mature and they find a cheaper rental or a better one for the same price, they often pursue the better opportunity. They don’t have a moral duty to extend their lease so that the landlord isn’t inconvenienced.
You DO realize that the vast majority of people, especially those on a fixed income, can’t pull together first and last month, plus a security deposit, plus whatever it would cost to get movers? So, that’s probably at least $3000 up front for all that for a low price rental ($1000), if not more, because in many places rent is over that now. It’s not cheap to move, and if you don’t have money put away, which many people do not, you’re fucked. This is why we have in some places tens of thousands of people living on the street or in their cars, because their old landlord saw dollar signs, and threw out their section 8 folks or fixed income folks in order to jack up rents.
The market won’t fix all our ills, because not all human activity is easily profitable, nor should it be.
