Airbnb bookings dry up in New York as new short-stay rules are introduced | Under the new restrictions, short-term renters will need to register with the city and must be present in the home for th...

Good. Fuck landlords, and especially Airbnb landlords. Hopefully other cities will follow suit.

I have friends who've run an AirBnB for nearly a decade. They they rent out a room to cover their property taxes. Our city imposed all of those rules mentioned, plus a few others, like regular inspections, several years ago. There were some initial problems as the city administration worked out how to implement the new rules, but overall it had very little effect on them and did not change the volume of their business.

The AirBnB hosts who are likely to have real problems under the new rules probably should. AirBnB runs the full range from responsible people trying to provide an honest service to opportunists looking for ways to take advantage of loopholes and gaps in the rules for profit. This will be inconvenient for the former and may put the later out of business. And I am okay with that.

Some areas like taxis and hotels may be over-regulated, but there are still good reasons for them to be regulated. Any business model that relies on avoidance of existing regulation deserves the inevitable changes it will cause.

Now do San Francisco.

This is mostly a good thing. The one part of it thats not good is that there is no real replacement. Most of the apartments here are very small, so visiting guests usually need to stay elsewhere. Hotels are very expensive here, so there is a gap where a short term rental style hotel is really needed.

Good.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The new rules are intended to effectively end a free-for-all in which landlords and residents have been renting out their apartments by the week or the night to tourists or others in the city for short stays.

The company’s global policy director, Theo Yedinsky, called the rule changes a blow to “the thousands of New Yorkers and small businesses in the outer boroughs who rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet”.

The company has, however, been forced to follow the new rules, and said that since 21 August it had stopped accepting new short-term reservations from any host who hadn’t provided either a city registration number or documentation that it was in process.

AirBnb had 38,500 active non-hotel listings in New York City as recently as January, and some hosts of smaller homes said they were being unfairly targeted and lumped in with larger apartment buildings.

While online rental listing services gave travelers more options in New York – and were a financial windfall to residents who rented out their homes while away on vacation – they have also led to complaints about scarce housing in residential neighbourhoods being booked up by tourists.

Regular tenants complained about buildings that suddenly felt like hotels, with strangers in their hallways and occasional parties in rented units.

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Hey Canada, your turn!

Gentrification is a feature that harms the people living in that area.