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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I'm of the view that property rights are an important component of civil rights. I think the constitution is on my side given the fourth amendment.

It's interesting that on HN I see near universal support for the freedom to smoke pot in one's home, or to live with a same-sex partner, or replace a lawn with a rock garden, or to have our communications remain private.

But when it comes to letting someone crash on your couch in exchange for a few bucks, suddenly there are calls for a full-scale invasion of privacy and limitation of what one can do in their own home, in order to protect one's neighbors from... what exactly?

Obviously property rights have reasonable limitations, but is Airbnb really such a case? If you have a neighbor that is hosting a bad guest, then surely the bad behavior is the problem (and probably already illegal).

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> freedom to smoke pot in one's home, or to live with a same-sex partner, or replace a lawn with a rock garden, or to have our communications remain private.

Those affect you.

> when it comes to letting someone crash on your couch in exchange for a few bucks

That scenario also only affects you, when you add the term 'occasionally'.

But if you live in a residential area and suddenly on four sides you find yourself with low-budget hotels with people coming and going at all hours and partying until 3 am because the owner of the apartment is absent when the guests are there then that is not a nice thing per-se and this is where your 'couch' starts to leak in to the lives of others around you.

So yes, AirBNB really can be such a case.

Then enforce noise regulations and other common property laws. If a long term tenant college party house moves in beside you, then you have the exact same problems. But you cannot blame AirBnB or similar in this case.

Long term college tenants as a rule are extremely well behaved, mostly because they value quiet as much as the next person (or even more) on account of their studies. They may have a few more parties than any other household but as a rule they don't generate too much of a problem because they are in there for the longer term and so have to be on good terms with the rest of the neighborhood.

And I would not blame AirBNB in that case because they have absolutely nothing to do with that.

People "coming and going" at all hours? How is that a problem? People are allowed to go into and out of their houses at any hour. Are you going to get all pissy if your neighbor works odd hours and gets home at 3am every night? If you're talking about a residential area with single family homes, how likely is it you're actually going to hear or notice someone entering or leaving your neighbor's house in the middle of the night?

"Partying until 3am" is possibly a problem. That's what noise ordinances are for.

> People are allowed to go into and out of their houses at any hour.

They're allowed to, sure. But in practice the expectation is that these are the exceptions, not the rule and apartments are typically constructed with that expectation in mind.

> Are you going to get all pissy if your neighbor works odd hours and gets home at 3am every night?

No, where did you get that impression? My neighbor, who works odd hours and gets home at 3am every night is a considerate person and has a long term relationship with me, his neighbor. And that's why he tries not to slam the door and he doesn't invite his 4 drunk friends over to his digs for 24 hours.

> If you're talking about a residential area with single family homes, how likely is it you're actually going to hear or notice someone entering or leaving your neighbor's house in the middle of the night?

I'm not talking about 'single family homes', I'm talking about apartments in just about every major city where AirBNB and such are getting people very upset.

> "Partying until 3am" is possibly a problem. That's what noise ordinances are for.

Yes, except that if your 'neighbors' change every 24 hours they don't give a damn about their reputation they will just do it until the police shows up and then do it somewhere else the next day.

It's no doubt the exception for AirBnB guests as well. Most people, even when they're staying out of town, don't throw wild parties in the middle of the night.

> Yes, except that if your 'neighbors' change every 24 hours they don't give a damn about their reputation they will just do it until the police shows up and then do it somewhere else the next day.

Really? Are we positing that there are roving bands of assholes who travel from one AirBnB to the next, throwing wild parties every night? Is there something to back that up? If such people exist, I doubt they'd find a lack of AirBnB sufficient motivation to be a respectful neighbor.

Living around other human beings means that sometimes someone does something that annoys you. Yeah, it sucks if there's a party and you have to call the police one night. It happens. That's part of the cost of living in a society. There's a lot of benefits too.

The city of Amsterdam has created a 'meldpunt' for issues with short term stay residents (such as AirBNB guests), they probably did this because they have an excess of funds and need to spend that money somehow.

I'm kind of surprised that you think that there is no impact from having an AirBNB hostel in your apartment, you probably have no idea what a typical Amsterdam-centrum house look like but you should probably believe me that coming-and-going is something that you'd most definitely notice and a party in one of those old houses might as well happen in your house.

Hotel guests on average do not behave like residents, they're on a holiday after all and are out to have some fun. In Amsterdam that usually translates into going out, doing drugs and visiting the red light district. Elderly ladies and tourgroups tend to stay in hotels.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with people renting out their single-family home in whatever way they see fit but when your next door neighbor is a paper wall away you can't just set up a hotel in the same building without taking some pretty good measures that there won't be any negative impact for the other residents.

I'm fine with that being regulated by the property manager or the landlord prohibiting sub-letting (as most leases do). Amsterdam is a unique situation since it attracts people who are specifically there to do things that are illegal in the places they come from. That's not the majority of AirBnB usage. I don't think we need city-wide regulations limiting what people can do with their own property.

That's not how it works. Apartments are owned by individuals who are jointly members of an owners association. So there is no 'property manager' and there are usually no 'landlords'.

In rental places this is not a problem but it is a problem for people that own apartments in the old city.

If the owners association is anything like a condo board or a homeowners association in the US, they should have more than enough authority to enact whatever rules they want in their building. If they don't, maybe they can amend their bylaws so that they do.

I do think that most bad behavior is already covered by existing laws. Yes, the guests might not care, but the owner ultimately has to own the place and answer to the local authorities and the owners association or whatnot. If there are constant complaints about your property, you're going to be held accountable for it, whether you live there or not.

> in order to protect one's neighbors from... what exactly?

In my case, the late-night noise, rubbish and vomit of the people staying in the apartment above mine.

The vomit was disgusting, it splashed down all the balconies from the 5th floor to the ground. But at least the culprit was immediately obvious. A cleaning bill was sent to the owner of that apartment, and the different-every-weekend people having a party on the balcony above mine stopped.

And it's hardly a few bucks. More like €80-100/night.

> limitation of what one can do in their own home

It's typically forbidden to use your home as a restaurant, crèche, laundry etc without some form of permission. Why should turning it into a hotel be different?

Your neighbors can also have rowdy friends over. What difference does it make whether the people there are paying or not?

If there's behavior with negative externalities, regulate the behavior. Not the particular circumstances.

"regulate the behavior"

what if the behavior is already regulated, but is difficult to enforce?

Then step up enforcement. That's the problem which should be addressed, and is just as relevant if a bunch of stereotypically rowdy college kids move in next door.

what if said company spends millions applying political pressure to oppose that?

If the neighbour lives there, they have to handle the fallout, whether that's angry people bashing on their door past midnight, the police, or just spiteful glances in the morning.

With AirBnB-as-a-hotel, the neighbour hardly ever has to meet the people they're annoying.

This surely makes a difference in the behaviour of guests.

> restaurant

Supper clubs are a thing. People invite others over and cook for them. Some are so popular that money probably changes hands. Do we need to regulate that?

> crèche

I had to look this up, but it sounds like a daycare. People do childcare/babysitting in their homes. That's not unusual. Children are usually cared for in a home.

> laundry

If you're talking about installing a full laundromat in your house, yeah you might run into problems. If you want to charge someone a couple bucks to use your washer and dryer, I don't see how that's going to run into any problems. There are no laws restricting how frequently you're allowed to do laundry within your own home that I know of (other than maybe noise complaints that might happen if you're doing laundry in the middle of the night in some apartment complexes).

in order to protect one's neighbors from... what exactly?

Their lives being disrupted. There are enough horror stories out there that you'd have to try very hard to ignore them - short term renters simply do not care about community and shared spaces in the same way that long term residents do.

You living with a same-sex partner has absolutely no effect on my life. You renting out your apartment to tourists who are loud, disruptive and trash common property does. And yes, that behaviour is already illegal but it's incredibly difficult to secure any kind of prosecution for it.

I'm not suggesting that we should ban AirBnb here, but I think "it's all just property rights" is also a dramatic oversimplification in the opposite direction.

Don't be motivated by horror stories.

Airbnb has hosted over 40 million people. More people than the population of California.

I'm sure there are some bad experiences on Airbnb (and in California, where there are multiple murders every day) but are they statistically significant?

The horror stories are actually what is important in the face of 40 million people staying in various places. Big numbers are big numbers and nothing especially interesting in-and-of-themselves.

That you would so callously discount the discomfort people feel in their own homes due to the profit motive of their neighbors is what should be emphasized as the negative aspect of what AirBnB enables. You care about statistical significance and not the human aspect and I simply can't respect that sort of inhuman profit-loss calculation.

> in order to protect one's neighbors from... what exactly?

Drunken guests regularly wake my 62 year old mother up by pounding on the wrong door at 2AM. She's been complaining for many months to Airbnb and they do not care.

An Airbnb guest got into a fight with a tenant of my previous apartment building. Only possible because Airbnb let drunken frat boys party in a building full of families.

The Airbnb host doesn't care, the Airbnb guest doesn't care, and Airbnb itself doesn't care. The people that care have no ability to fix the problem.

I think the right not to be interfered with is important too. This includes property rights, but I wouldn't necessarily put it at the very top of the list morally. They're pretty important economically.

In any case, I think it's interesting you said "freedom to smoke pot in one's home." Many aspects of liberalism/libertarianism are fairly incompatible with fundamentalism, though people try. Once you accept that a little taxation is necessary to fund police or something, you give up on a fundamentalist purity. Once you put in a caveat that you're freedoms end where they diminish another's you end up with grey areas.

The grey area here is that what you do with your property affects your neighbours. If you have a rock garden or an unkempt mess (or a wrong coloured door if you're in the Netherlands) the neighbourhood is different. Everything we do affects other people and we need some lines. AirBnB built an entire society in the grey area. The whiter sections are renting a couch to travellers. A darker shad might be a setup that rents out 4 apartments in a 10 unit building with appeal to a noisier or more disruptive market segment.

> But when it comes to letting someone crash on your couch in exchange for a few bucks, suddenly there are calls for a full-scale invasion of privacy and limitation of what one can do in their own home, in order to protect one's neighbors from... what exactly?

Are we talking about someone crashing on your couch? Or we talking about someone who converts their property into a perpetual short-term rental?

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