Airbnb and San Francisco
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
C'mon Sam, you can do better than this. Just about everyone's income helps them pay their rent or mortgage regardless of where it comes from. And let's not pretend (a) parkinson's law doesn't exist or (b) people allocate specific income sources to specific expenses. If you make more, you spend more. If you have to pay your rent on the 1st, you write a check from your bank account–you don't pull cash out of your "AirBnB income" envelope.
And, BTW, I've never rented an AirBnB in SF who wasn't (a) a young professional that could afford to live there or (b) someone 40+ who clearly had lived in SF a long time and bought prior to the spike in prices. These statistics and stance just don't compute for me.
Look, I love AirBnB and I think it's a great service. But it's just that–the best short-term/vacation rental service. Nothing more. I'm a little tired of them (and their apologists) acting like they're some kind of cultural juggernaut.
I always knew they'd have huge political forces to answer to (my friends and I would often wager who was more likely to succumb to governments: Uber or AirBnB). They're going to have enforce bed taxes. They're going to have to police municipal laws, HOA regulations, and more. And after it all shakes out, maybe this isn't as profitable of a business as people thought (for both AirBnB and hosts).
Of course, like Uber, they'll likely take the lobbyist route to fight this (maybe they already have). But this is a case where a little humility would go a long way IMO. Would it be so hard for AirBnB or Sam to say "yeah, there's a housing issue and we might even be part of the cause. so let's work together to find a solution or compromise."?
I think Airbnb is well aware of the housing issue and more than willing to work together on solutions.
I'm sorry, that's just not true, and Sam, I admire a lot of what you've said on a lot of issues, but I cannot believe that you are sincere in this article overall, unless you are just naive.
Any property owner in San Francisco has always been able to go to the Planning Commission and request a conditional use permit to turn their home into a bed and breakfast, and as far as we can tell, no such request has ever been denied.
Renters in San Francisco do not in almost any case I have ever heard of have the right to sublet our apartments, even to additional roommates, without the approval of our landlords, and with good reason.
If a person has lived in San Francisco for some time, and loses their ability to earn enough to pay their rent, it is abusive and narcissistic for that person to believe that simply by having the keys to a place that already does not belong to them, they can - with no consideration for their neighbors - turn their home into a business. A hotel business, no less, which kind of foists upon them the responsibilities of travel guides, as we read in an article this morning.
Now, as demand for housing in an area is shooting up, individual renters are leveraging that in a way that does not contribute to the cost of maintaining property, putting increased pressure on other tenants, and disallowing the landlord from actually satisfying that demand.
All that aside, AirBnb knows what the fuck they are doing. I know at least one successful AirBnb host who has had AirBnb approach them and encourage them to rent up nearby apartments and turn them into new units!
San Francisco housing activists have asked time and time again for AirBnb to open up data about how many hosts have multiple units, and who is renting when not in their unit, so that data may be used over time to guide regulation, but as is becoming a trend with YC companies, private executives and investors feel that they can do better city planning than people who have decades or perhaps their entire lives invested in doing so.
Put up or shut the fuck up, sir.
-- Upton Sinclair iirc
What exactly about the current state of SF makes you think the people doing city planning here are in any way competent?
Rather than just point out specific issues with the merits of the argument, you implied he is either insincere, or naive.
You may be aware that there are people who specifically choose not to live in a high rent place such as San Francisco or Manhattan (as only two examples) because it is expensive and they can't afford it. And they know it and understand that is part of the "life is not fair" theme. Not everyone will make enough to rent or buy in those places and there is nothing new about this either. That it impacts startups is an entirely different issue. And startups are the reason the rent is so high obviously in San Francisco, right?
Where I am located it's impossible to get anywhere near the quality of labor that I might get if I was located in San Francisco, NYC or really any large metropolitan area. Obviously I have made a choice (for many reasons) to be where I am (as have many others). Everyone makes choices. If you move to San Francisco to take a job you have to factor in the cost of housing when you make your decision to work there. As far as the legacy people who live there and are impacted in a negative way that is truly an unfortunate situation.
Having said that, I think Airbnb is a fine way for people to earn some money making use of their existing spare housing. I may dislike the PR/marketing bullshit that is the term "sharing economy", but I'm pretty disappointed that this thread seems to be full of Airbnb bashing. While they may not be the ideal solution to SF's housing woes, it's pretty clear that they're not part of the problem... or if they are, it seems they're at least doing more good than bad.
for some, income is just a means to an end.
airbnb isn't providing this extra income for free. it expects hosts to provide a service, which requires work, which requires time and energy.
if that extra income is just offsetting the rise in housing costs, then quality of life is decreasing ...
First, most (all?) HOAs and landlords forbid short term rentals, and for good reason (short term renting is generally disliked by neighbors).
Second, city zoning policies are implemented for a reason, again, a good one. Residential neighborhoods generally prefer little or no commercial activity as well as inhabitants who care about the neighborhood.
I have not seen AirBnB weigh in reasonably on these important issues. For that, it's possible it deserves Prop F.
So it's easier to not bother at all and catch flak than it is to do an "insufficient" amount of addressing concerns and get the same amount of flak from the same people.
Welcome to VC land. The game is: collect everybody else's money and resources for yourself at any cost. It's even easier when laws and regulations are either toothless or only get applied across 8 to 16 year time periods, so you can flaunt them with no repercussions.
with airbnb, if you can't afford your $3,000/month rent so you take in a share tenant, maybe now you can afford $5,000 month in rent. now housing prices know everybody can make $5k/month appear through tenant-izing, so all prices go up. now nobody can afford a place unless they take in co-habitating renters or are DINKs.
The two parts are: fast-flux roommate discovery versus entire apartments.
Fast-flux roommate discovery is generally okay. You may have a roommate anyway, but this just lets you cycle them out daily/weekly/monthly. Plus, if the person is bad/rude/evil, you have to deal with them as well as your neighbors. You've got skin in the game.
The fast-flux roommate thing gets shady when the owner says "i'll just sleep on the couch while you visit" or other variations of not really having enough room for a roommate, but making do. A lot of listings have that weird dynamic.
The second, and more damaging, part of the AiRbNb story is when people become management companies and rent a dozen or a hundred apartments in a city to be 100% aIrBnB units. That is where real problems start. Rent apartments for $2,000 per month on a yearly lease then turn around and market them as short-term rentals for $200 per night. It's so common there are multiple concierge startups focused around cleaning and key-providing for short term sharing economy rentals taken out of the local for-natives housing supply. It's so common there are routine 'airbnb lies' your bookings are supported to tell to all the neighbors or doorman or building security if they get asked who they are (oh, I'm Sally's cousin!!!)
(oh, and the third way, a middle ground between the first two, is when you rent out your apartment just while you're on vacation or whatnot. This is more of a traditional sublet scenario, just facilitated by an evil megacorp who charges too many fees. This falls into the "generally okay" bucket like fast-flux roommate discovery.)
Which is already illegal in SF, so if this is happening (the article states that it is not), SF needs to actually enforce its laws. This isn't a problem or criticism of Airbnb.
But as the article said, less than 1 in 1000 units rent enough AirBnB nights to break even on rent in SF, which means that unless the agencies are subsidizing their income elsewhere, it's not a problem.
Do you have anything to back that up?
I'm not sure how a better solution would be implemented -- allow people to choose which jurisdiction their vote applies to?
People who _want_ to live somewhere have no rights to it. They are by definition not yet part of the community. That's like allowing job applicants vote on company policy. I'm sure they would want to, but communities are defined by those in them.
The problem is that it encourages and allows NIMBY attitudes to proliferate, and creates an environment of stagnation. I certainly think we should balance the wishes of current residents, but there has to be limits.
I do live in SF, and I'm pissed that other residents are allowed to slow down housing development. SF is turning into a less desirable place for me to live because of the housing crunch... and I'm not even talking about my rent costs. I don't want to live in a city where only high-income people (and entrenched incumbents with ridiculous rent control) can afford to live. The NIMBYs are the problem, here.
It's kind of frustrating.
For the purposes of Prop F, statistics that seem more relevant are
- how many units are rented more than 90 nights (the current law) [1]
- how many units are rented more than 75 nights (as proposed by Prop F)
When I see AirBnB supporters focusing on a number that doesn't seems as relevant, it feels like spin to me.
> The median number of trips per unit was 5, and mean was 13.3.
Interesting shift here to talking about trips per unit, rather than nights per unit. Back in 2012, the average stay was 5.5 days [2]. So does that mean that the average number of days per unit is 71.5 (5.5 * 13)?
Also, according to the Chronicle [3], out of the 5,459 listings in 2015, "205 hosts have three or more listings. These super hosts account for 4.8 percent of all hosts, but control 993 properties — 18.2 percent of Airbnb’s local listings." I didn't see anything in Sam's post or the other anti-Prop F posts that discusses this.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-...
[2] http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/
[3] http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/...
That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.
However, the city's already limited units to 90 days, so the 211ers are already handled -- if the city (with AirBnB's cooperation) enforces the law, that is. So I don't this point isn't particularly relevant to Prop F. Your mileage may vary, of course!
I think it's actually a useful metric. A big complaint from neighbors seems to be "frequency of new strangers coming and going", which is what this metric quantifies.
> A big complaint from neighbors seems to be "frequency of new strangers coming and going", which is what this metric quantifies.
If my downstairs neighbor rents to a AirBnB guest I would still call them a "stranger" even after 5.5 days.
Oh, agreed. I don't think there's any reasonable value of "short term" where that wouldn't be the case.
Then again, I've lived in my current building for over a year, and I don't know anyone in the building. A few I recognize on sight, but we all tend to keep to ourselves. I'd consider them "strangers" too.
The high price of housing in San Francisco is caused by one (and only one) thing: NIMBYism.
If supply is constrained and new high-rise developments are held back, there will always be higher prices and a distorted market.
In reality, Airbnb doesn't have any measurable effect on the price of housing. (Still, it may help alleviate the situation slightly for some people living in the city.)
I completely agree that the lack of new housing is a huge component of the high prices, but it is reductive to pretend that a particular pet issue is the only thing causing SF's housing shortage. It's a huge problem with myriad causes.
Residents in SF and the peninsula are pretty quick to try to put the housing-problem blame [1] on anything tech related, but traditionally haven't wanted to increase the supply (high density housing).
[1] http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/20/sf-and-oakland-activ...
This is why Airbnb helps maintain untenable pricing levels. There's more money to go around and rates can keep going up with no bearing on vacancies.
A rental management company with 20% vacancies wouldn't be so quick to raise prices; but, as long as the tenants magically come up with ways of catching up with increased prices, the prices will continue going up.
Isn't it impossible for AirBnB not to either drive up price levels or drive down availability?
If you have a property, AirBnB immediately makes it more valuable, as it is now possible to generate a (reasonably) passive income from it - you can use it more efficiently than before. If you own a home or rent.
What economics are you using in which it doesn't immediately follow that this would eventually reflect in the rental/purchase price of housing units?
Ahh "rent control and regs" you say! Ok fine, then the market tries to reach its equilibrium on quantity and fewer units are available. AirBnB makes housing more valuable, and if there is any vestige of market forces in SF housing, its effect on price/supply is unambiguous.
This DOES NOT, however, mean that AirBnB is a bad thing. I firmly believe it is an incredibly beneficial thing for everyone and it boggles my mind how people can be so against a service whose only function is to allow us to use our resources more efficiently. If this energy were instead spent on analyzing all the distortions that our wonderful political system has introduced in the system, we'd be much better off.
If the stats you brought are correct, that means that there exist a considerable amount of tenants which couldn't afford their apartments if not for Airbnb. Ultimately, as rental markets balance their price against vacancies, market rates will go up.
Without AirBNB, people would have to find alternate ways to do so, and if they couldn't would likely not be able to continue to live in their selected housing. That reduces demand on apartments (as people can no longer make money).
Those who don't operate an AirBnB business in their homes will be economically priced out as a disadvantage to those who do. This means that residency in SF will ultimately require it ... and that entire neighborhoods will ultimately be transformed to be dominated by private hoteliers. Squeezing out the poor sap who doesn't optimize reselling each unused square foot of their home.
How much longer will the professional, middle class populous, put up with their savings being drained by over inflated housing costs? Sadly, it seems far too many people see SF as a professional vacation place, and not a home. When I moved there for work, I also moved there to live. I wanted to do so in a sustainable way, which means saving money every month for retirement, and possibly buying a home. That's a pipe dream in SF, even with a nationally competitive salary.
I cannot figure out whether there is blatant city corruption, or a complete lack-of-caring about the middle class. Or is it that there aren't enough developers trying to develop?
Prop F is another silly policy.
San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (yes, the acronym is unfortunate): http://www.sfbarf.org/
San Francisco Housing Action Coalition: http://www.sfhac.org/
Both will notify you when there are city meetings coming up where you could show up and inject some sanity into the proceedings.
Thanks for the links.
Airbnb commissioned this economist[1]. That doesn't necessarily mean his conclusions aren't credible, but commissioned research that supports the agenda of the company that commissioned it should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny. Is there any independent research Altman can cite?
> Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city.
What about their neighbors? If I'm paying good money to rent an apartment or I shell out big bucks for a new condo, why should I be forced to live in a hotel-like environment because a neighbor decides to violate the lease or association CC&Rs/bylaws?
It doesn't matter how well-intentioned a host is. It's callous to have sympathy for hosts who are violating leases and condo association association CC&Rs/bylaws and no sympathy for the neighbors their selfish behavior negatively affects.
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/30/airbnb-pushes-u...
Otherwise known as the income that one would have previously obtained by renting a room to a permanent resident. The big difference with Airbnb is that the service is removing potential rooms and roommate situations from the market. I'm not going to say whether Airbnb is a good thing as honestly I'm leaning toward it being a net benefit. But to say it has not made finding a place to live permanently in places like SF and NYC more difficult for 1st time and early in life renters is difficult for me to agree with.
All progress has a price. And often that price is worth the benefit. But let's not pretend there are not people out there that will be worse off in the short term.
Not true. If I want to rent my place out for a week while I'm out of town, that would be income that could never be provided by a permanent resident. If I rent out a spare room to someone in town for the weekend, that's not a permanent resident. Maybe I don't want a permanent roommate, but just want some supplementary income here and there.
You're certainly welcome to argue that I shouldn't be allowed to do that, but I'd disagree with that point of view, and that has nothing to do with whether or not a permanent resident could be served by the space.
Until now, the rise and of tech companies has been determined by the double-edged blad of innovation. Someone makes something new that works better, gets big, and then someone else makes something newer and displaces them. Repeat cycle over and over. It's why in tech, we specialize in the art and business of innovation.
What we don't know how to do is navigate murky political waters. We're really, really bad at it. Can you imagine another $10BN company even letting this kind of bill happen, that would kill their largest market if it passed?
Airbnb isn't alone. Uber hired Obama's campaign manager because they realized they're biggest existential threat is a political one too. But see their ongoing lawsuits and outright bans in other countries – they haven't figured how to solve the political question either.
Meanwhile, car companies with a lower market cap, like GM, could figure out how to get a bailout from the government – right after it bailed out another huge industry, banks.
Those guys are just better at it. They have been for a long time. They get things like "don't optimize to something that solves problems. Optimize optics." Or that real deals get done behind closed doors, because you can control what happens there. That by the time it becomes a public debate, you've already lost the game.
We in tech have a disgust for politics. Rightfully so. It's useless at best and harmful more often. It doesn't follow the clear, hard and fast rules that the rest of tech does. But if we don't hold our nose and figure out how to play the game, or better yet, reinvent it, we'll get outplayed on the biggest board of them all.
And yet these are the battles that "technology" companies like Uber and Airbnb had to know were coming. At best, they live in a legal gray area. You can't start a company skirting existing laws and expect politicians to look the other way.
And it's not just politicians that are responsible for this. As a condo owner, I specifically don't want Airbnb to be available in my association. There are reasons that there are laws against leasing and subleasing apartments, and it's not just to screw over startups.
Uber and Airbnb grew to huge valuations on the back of pushing externalities onto others. Airbnb is taking their cut and looking the other way on things like taxes, zoning regulations and such until they are forced to deal with it. Uber pushes similar things off onto their "contractors".
Now the political environment is catching up to them, and it's time to deal with the same legal environment that every other company has to deal with.
If you run a $10 billion company that's in the business of housing, one of the most sensitive subjects not just politically but socially, and you don't anticipate pushback, then the problem isn't politics, it's a lack of social awareness. There's nothing murky or unknowable about it: people care deeply about the character of their communities and if that's your business then you've got to get ahead of their concerns before they blame you when changes happen that they don't like.
To ordinary people, disruption is a bad thing. The onus is on the people hoping to profit from disruption to explain to people why change will be for the better. You can't do that if you cultivate a disgust for the political process.
Speak for yourself. Uber and AirBnB's businesses are extracting profits by ignoring the costs of complying with regulation, or by pushing those costs onto others. In an apartment building, probably none of the other residents signed up for the additional wear and tear on the common parts of the building, the noise and the security risk of a hotel suddenly appearing in their building - but they quite literally pay for it, and the "landlord" pockets the difference.
Similarly Uber isn't a tech company, they are just unlicensed minicabs, something that most cities stamped out with good reason.
I for one do not have a blanket disgust for politics, I am mature and realistic enough to understand that it is a necessary part of having a functioning government.
And you don't see them complaining too much about those regulatory hurdles. Because those same hurdles also create a barrier to entry.
It's much easier to overcome a regulatory scheme if you're a $10BN company, than a $10M one.
Apartments are designed for long-term residents. Why should we even consider allowing them to become budget hotels?
That all said, I think there are things that AirBnB can do to mitigate all this: standards enforcement division. A 24-hour service where you call them up, make your complaint, and they send over some big scary people to knock on the offender's door and ask them to "turn it down" or "pick up their garbage." Local government offices and the landlords themselves can't respond quickly enough (the former can't/won't send someone there at 2AM and it'd be pretty tough to get the latter to run over to your apartment for this sort of thing.) Basically AirBnB police. There are steps that can be taken that don't involve the local government or housing authority; I think AirBnB would be wise to take them.
I have trouble believing AirBnB helps SF. Anecdotally, I know a few people who rent their places on AirBnB. All live in rent controlled units and effectively re-rent at market rates. One actually reduced hours at his job because income from AirBnB was so lucrative.
I will never understand why most Americans generally favor a tough-luck, fire-at-will attitude for employment, but are in favor of rent control and making eviction extremely difficult.
Coming from New Zealand, it's the other way around (it's extremely difficult to fire people, but there is no rent control and you can evict anyone with 90 days notice).
Not saying one or the other is necessarily better (I personally think somewhere in the middle for both approaches would be best), but strict eviction laws and rent control always seemed very un-American to me.
Several of the (smaller) companies I've worked for would not have survived if not for at-will employment. That's certainly helped me as an employee.
Fortunately I haven't yet fallen on the "wrong" side of that equation; I imagine I might feel differently if I had... but then that's kinda irrelevant.
Sources of this data?
How many Airbnb people are putting out property they own vs those who are renting?
It sounds like people are abusing it to stay in homes they could otherwise not afford, which is in itself adding to the housing problems in San Fran.
Facilitating someone easily renting out their home, great. Allowing renters (and to a lesser extent home owners) subsidize their over extended living, bad.
This is a crazy figure. That's saying hosts only charge 1.7X more per night than they would get from a roommate or tenant. That's ridiculous.
A quick search on AirBnB shows rooms in my neighborhood going for $130-230. That's $4k-7K/month for a room fully booked. A quick search on Craigslist shows roommates wanted for $1200-2200. That's about a 3X markup, nearly double what Airbnb claims.
That matches anecdotally what I hear a lot. People are increasingly preferring to AirBnB rooms instead of seeking roommates. They get more money and/or have more control over their space. No getting stuck with a crazy roommate, no overnight guests, you can have the place to yourself when you want, etc. This takes housing stock off the residential market and moves it to the more attractive tourist market. It's similar when you look at entire apartments too and the incentives to hold onto them and Airbnb them after you've really moved out, instead of letting new residents move in.
So the 75 day limit that Prop F proposes is much better targeted at changing those economics than the current 120 day limit (which is not very enforceable anyway). That means you'd have to charge 5X to break even vs. a long term rental, which is too much. So it only makes sense to AirBnB rooms/units that really would never go onto the long term market anyway.
The whole magic of the sharing economy is better asset utilization and thus lower prices for everyone. Home sharing makes better utilization out of a fixed asset, and by more optimally filling space it means the same number of people can use less supply.
"better utilization out of a fixed asset" is how we talk about factory machinery, not so much living space.
Housing has physical implications and psychological cost. If we wanted optimal space filling, we'd put 10,000 bunk beds in a warehouse and tell people to deal with it. The proles can have their bunk bed warehouse while the billionaires can have estates in San Francisco. et voilà, optimal filling of space allocated by level of monetary expenduture.
You know, if there were such arrangements, I'm sure that there would be people who would jump on them. I'm a little surprised Google hasn't built company dormitories, since they've got people living in vans in the parking lot rather than paying $3000 a month for a studio apartment.
There are other arguments to be made about the quality of service & safety. Read some of the comments from another recent HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291070
My own individual and anecdotal story: as an individual whose neighbor was AirBnB-ing his apt next door to mine, seeing dozens of unfamiliar faces (and, without going into detail, the behavior and antics of some of these occupants) did not make me feel safe. If anything, they should severely restricted under this guise, not "affordable housing". (Though I do agree that more housing would generally improve the situation for all).
"In 2014 (the most recent year with available data) there were about 387,000
housing units in SF. About 38% were owner-occupied, and the remaining 62%
or 240,000 were rental units."Very low property taxes should be relatively neutral between holding and trading compared to higher property taxes.
Prop. 13 encourages holding over trading because, while it does control property tax rate, it also constrains tax basis value increases to small annual increases while you hold property, but reassesses at full market value when you buy a new property. Which means, it increases the incentives to hold on to property once you've purchased it and decreases the incentives to purchase property, because the property is (net) higher value to the current owner than a new purchaser with otherwise similar profile, since the new purchaser would have to pay higher annual property taxes.
Ok, there are a small number of units that are let or sub-let for 2/3 of the nights per year. That doesn't tell us much. I'd guess it would be near a full time job to keep your house let out 66% of the time. You wouldn't even be living there most of the time...how can you even really claim it to be yours?
Any observation would show that the primary use is for AirBnB and their customers.
I didn't reach out to any of the sponsors or advocates for Prop F, such as the political figures and organizations listed at http://www.sharebettersf.com/endorsements-propf-prop-f-airbn..., of course. And while this post is full of stats that sound a lot like the kind of thing you'd get from Airbnb PR, nowhere in it am I going to inquire further and link to an opposing view, or really engage with opposing views in any material way. I'll just dismiss them by saying that the solution is for SF to allow more building, as if making that happen hasn't been the most contentious and complicated issue in the city literally for generations.
One could also argue that I myself have helped drive up the high cost of housing in SF, both by running a program that requires the people it admits to move to SF in order to participate, and more generally by being part of a hype ecosystem that aims to convince impressionable young people that the only way to be successful in tech is to somehow jam yourself into this already bursting-at-the-seams city. I'm not really going to engage with that line of thought either, though.
It looks like AirBnB meeds to do some serious PR work. I think thier rapid rise is helping create the illusion that they impact the local housing market more than they actually do.
Why else would he say the fix to the housing problem is to put more housing on airbnb?
A huge part of the problem is that people are renting places just to sub-lease them. Guess what that does? Yup. It increases pricing where you are paying the zero value-add middleman more.
But hey, that can't possibly be part of the problem. /s
I'll leave you with this:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair iirc
B) However, I also lived in the bay area at one time, in Solano County, and was pursuing education with an eye towards going into some kind of urban planning related career. In fact, I founded and moderated a subforum for a time on the most successful urban planning forum around at that time. So I have some familiarity with how crazy prices were back then, before AirBnB was a gleam in anyone's eye. And also I have some familiarity with the various factors that go into forcing housing prices up. Saying AirBnB contributes to the problem is not crazy talk. But acting like they are the single most important factor meriting the passage of a bill intended to kill them off -- I want a tad more data than "But look at the crazy high local housing prices, man!" Because that falls far short of proving they are having that big of an effect.
C) Yeah, I am very familiar with the saying. I am well aware of how hard it is to be both profitable and ethical. So far, I have managed to be pretty ethical. I am also dirt poor. So I am a little tired of hearing that anyone making money is clearly The Devil. The fact that this is part of a pro AirBnB PR campaign does not ipso facto make it inherently evil. The other side is also engaging in a PR campaign, and they also have vested interest that you can put a dollar amount on. Sometimes, people are actually doing work they actually fucking believe in. Those people still need to EAT and put a roof over their head. I am so goddamn sick of the idea that all the good people are dead martyrs and, if you still draw breathe, you need to feel guilty about every single fucking thing you do to try to keep body and soul together.
The main thing I've kept my eye on is interest rates, but there are obviously other factors. I'm not convinced rising interest rates would even have that much impact--there will always be people with more money who want to live here for the weather/culture/food/location.
Then I would look at trying to find ways to incentivize making small spaces with housing basics more available.
I would also look at economic factors like the fact that you can live in SF without a car, so some people can afford the nosebleed rental prices because they are paying only for rent rather than rent plus a car. And I would consider creating a PR program around that angle. Walkable communities typically are more expensive, because humans value the high quality of life they afford, and they are mostly zoned out of existence. A lot of things that historically created walkable communities cannot be recreated under modern car-centric zoning laws.
Edit: To be clear, those are things I would start with, not everything I would do.
Moreover, I don't think anyone can actually prove or disprove something like that (there will always be a "but did you consider that?" argument to be made). Which makes sama's earlier comment asking for proof disingenuous.
Maybe it's hard to be ethical and profitable? idk. And, I don't mean to imply EVIL(!). You don't need to be evil to ignore a piece of info that might harm your livelihood: we are all equipped with brains that come standard with a range of cognitive biases we can subconsciously choose from :)
And, that is what I was trying to allude to.
Again, not EEEVIIIIIL. Just cognitive bias.
Look, the problem as I see it is that you can genuinely in your heart of hearts believe this is the Right answer and you can have come to that conclusion independently of making any money off it and the minute you make money, people will piss on the idea that you are suggesting something because you really and truly for realzy realz believe it is the right answer.
This is a thing I am very familiar with. I have a serious health problem. I have gotten myself dramatically healthier when doctors say it cannot be done. It precludes me having a normal job. I do freelance work online and I run a number of websites. I had a health site for years and it really did not make money and I was given absolute hell from all sides for having ads on it or a donate button or affiliate links. I was decried as the devil, endangering people's lives. blah blah blah blah blah and all kinds of other shit. The fact that I actually fucking have this serious condition and actually fucking got myself healthier with the things I was talking about made zero difference. I was (THEORETICALLY but not actually) "making money" for sharing the information, so, clearly, I was a snake oil salesman, trying to get rich off the suffering of other people.
The nanosecond you make a plug nickel off of anything, people will hang you high. I don't care how ethical you are. I don't care how much you really believe in it and have tested it yourself and are the real deal, people will riot in the streets about how the only possible reason you are saying that is to make a buck and not because you genuinely think it is true and thought it was true before there was any money involved.
So I am a tad burnt out on hearing how "If someone is making money on it, they are all liars and con artists and suffer cognitive bias and blah blah blah blah." Those accusations mean that NO ONE can promote anything unless they are martyrs who are getting absolutely nothing out of it at all ever under any circumstances.
I am well aware of cognitive bias and the mental models we don't even know we are operating under. I spent a lot of time in therapy and I still spend a lot of time examining myself and other people around me with an eye towards "actions speak louder than words" -- with an eye towards believing the patterns of behavior I see them engaging in, never mind what they are telling me. But I am the wrong person to have this argument with. I am so incredibly sick of hearing this from people.
Let's say Sam does what the founder of Habitat for Humanity did and gives away all his wealth and goes campaigning for housing solutions in San Francisco and at that point he concludes, based on years of study, that AirBnB is part of the solution and not part of the problem. At that point will you accept that he isn't just "suffering cognitive bias"? Is that what it takes for him to make an argument and not get accused of being specious?
I have news for you, I doubt it. I am HOMELESS. I still have to hear shit from people about being a snake oil salesman and a liar and a teller of tall tales and endless utter and complete shit.
So, sorry, you chose the wrong person to try to make this point to. I just am the wrong person to talk to about this.
Edit: For some reason, your follow up comment to me is dead, so I cannot reply to it directly.
You saying Sam is in a bubble of yes-men carries more weight with me than "Well, money!" But, in essence, attacking Sam and his reasons for saying what he is saying just pisses me off. Attack his argument -- come up with stats about how AirBnB is impacting the SF real estate market and argue whatever it is you think is the truth here. But please don't talk to me about the vested interest he has and how that causes cognitive bias. That is damn close to being a personal attack and it is basically an unfounded bullshit attack because both sides have vested interest or they wouldn't be arguing it. Duh. So what is the fucking point in pointing that out?
If I understand it correctly, one of the most common ways of evicting rent-controlled tenants is through owner move in. A side effect of this is that the owner has to "live there" for 3 years[0]. Given this, it seems like this statistic -- which, taken out of context, could be used to demonize rent-controlled units as wasting valuable housing stock -- is actually forced on the short-term rental market by profit-seeking landlords.
WHY doesn't AirBnB have a fraud checking department where apartments like this are booked by agents of AirBnB to check in on just such things.
If ALL AirBnB hosts KNEW that their next tenant COULD be an actual AirBnB rep -- then they wouldn't pull shit like this as often.
And they should be able to get a "Verified good by AirBnB stays"
IMO the highest impact solution is to focus on transportation. But that's a topic for another discussion.
Would love to understand more about the housing market over there since you don't see it in the press nearly as much as the Bay Area.
Boulder continues to develop, but its pace can't keep up with demand at all (which is a good thing). It's a university town, so there's lots of rentals. But as for purchasing homes, there's really nothing "affordable" in Boulder proper (except perhaps compared to SF). Nor are there any "unsafe" parts of Boulder...
How is safety in those other areas or Denver proper?
Compared to the bay area, I used to live in the mountains of Santa Cruz, and now live in the mountains outside Boulder. Other than that, I don't have much experience with the differing areas of the SF peninsula.
I'd recommend maybe starting your research with Louisville. It's blown up quite a bit recently, but is not quite at Boulder prices.
If you have some specific questions about places from there, I'm happy to help. :)
my head is spinning..
(And also that the number of units that are effectively full-time rented on Airbnb is just about 1% of the entire off-rental-market supply--let's get that 99% back!)
"In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental."
This just didn't sound right; and doing the quick math with the average one bedroom going for 3500.. To reach that 211 day number would mean that rentals on air bnb are going for about 200.
But doing a search in SF for air bnb the average rental is 422.. Now some of these are multi room, and some are just a couch.. but I can't seem to find a single 1 bedroom non-share for under 260.
This makes that 211 figure feel like its off. Which makes me feel that the 340 units is off.
Can we see the calculations used? Also is there a big jump in those units at 210 days.. 200 or 182..
I mean as a land lord if you only have to work half the year and make only a little less revenue; plus the positive of less liabilities I could see my self wanting to air bnb over rent out my unit.
"While there are many larger underlying contributors to the housing shortage in San Francisco, it is possible that Airbnb adds stress on the margins."
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/11/airbnb-and-the-problem-of-d...
"Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city."
I really do want to discuss this reasonably, but to me, this is clearly a misuse of the word "share". There is a powerful emotion around "sharing", and to say that San Francisco is making it harder to "share" your home does have a different ring than saying it is making it harder to "rent out your home short term".
I will certainly agree that there can be some ambiguity around the word "share". For instance, if two people both pay equally for a large sandwich, they might say they "shared" it rather than "split it". But when you list your room on a website for a certain price, and someone pays you for it, I don't think we're anywhere close to that ambiguous grey area. This is clearly a quid-pro-quo commercial transaction. They can be friendly transactions, people can get to know each other through these transactions. I'm not even saying it's an undesirable transaction (more or less everyone I know things that airbnb has its place, though there is great disagreement over how these rentals should be regulated).
But I really don't think it's "sharing" by any reasonable definition of the term.
I say all this having just returned from a wonderful weekend that was made much better by Airbnb. It was a great service, I enjoyed it immensely, and it's sad to see that something so good could be ruined by leadership that threatens their brand by describing what they do with such overt dishonesty.
The sharing economy is real, it is also cash free. That's by definition. If you were making money you are not "sharing" anything. You are conducting short term rentals, and that's a very different beast. If you insist on using language like "sharing" anyway, don't be surprised when people respond with a few choice words of their own. If those words sting, consider that proof that your own use—or misuse—of words really does matter.
Related: when facing a political backlash, don't make your own position worse by giving your enemies even more ammunition.
It's a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, sharing sounds nice. Even as capitalists we are suspicious of efforts to make a profit. And many of the "sharing economy" services are about using things that you personally own and selling use of them to the public.
On the other hand, when AirBnB/Uber/etc try to make an economic argument for their services, it is clearly not around sharing. We're exchanging value (my empty home, parked car, etc.) for value (your dollars, as a proxy for work you have done.)
By sharing access to economic goods and services that were previously unavailable, waste from market inefficiencies are being eliminated. Just because companies are profiting from this waste elimination doesn't negate the fact that shared economies can still be beneficial.
Even so, considering the size of these markets now, I don't think people are going to confuse "Sharing economy" with altruism.
I think the term "share" is strictly agnostic on who pays but also does have a gifting connotation that appeals to marketing. I have no problem with its use here but if there is a better word what is it?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Sharing...
http://olivierblanchard.net/stop-calling-it-the-sharing-econ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/technology/twisting-words-...
Yes, it's not "sharing" when a middleman takes a fixed percentage of all transactions and works for maximizing their revenue.
The way you get your astrotuf terms to be less astro-turfy is to use them as often and in as many non-hostile situations as possible while still engendering them with a sense of "this is all for the best."
http://mondato.com/blog/apptivism/ and http://www.fastcompany.com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-th... and http://www.wired.com/2014/12/sharing-economy-pr-stunt-turned... and google is your friend.
If you are cohabiting with the guest (for example, an actual bed and breakfast), then it would be correct to say that you share your home.
If you give exclusive access to the guest, it would be more correct to say that you are renting, leasing, or subleasing your home.
I am not saying you are outright wrong to feel the way you feel, but I am saying that for some people, AirBnB really is about sharing their home and their lives, not just subletting for money.