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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Not quite - Airbnb shifts demand from traditional tourist accommodation like hotels and guest houses into standard domestic units.

I'm not arguing that this is necessarily bad, but it's really interesting to look at the reasons why this is happening and the negative effects it can have. Increasing domestic prices because of underutilisation is one.

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The upside of AirBnB-like approaches is flexibility. Each person doing one or more rentals (of units that they don't usually live in) has low total capex, meaning expanding to serve increased demand is very quick compared to building a hotel. But it's obvious that this increases both volatility and prices on both the rental and housing markets.

I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a problem and affected cities introduce heavy taxation on short-term renting out dwellings which you don't usually live in and which are not planned for commercial use.

OTOH, "semi-commercial" actors renting out apartments has existed for a lot longer than AirBnB. We stayed in one of these in Rome for a week in '09, found through some website for private rentals (AirBnB went international in '11). So it's not really a new thing, just a slicker UX which may or may not increase total demand for such services.

As I said: All the folks criticizing AirBnB want to do is make sure they aren't the ones who face the problem.

Tourists are people too, and need a place to live. The folks in Barcelona just want to make sure it's the tourists, rather than them, who suffer from the housing shortage.

Tourists before AirBnB would simply not visit somewhere if the hotel price was beyond what they could afford.

Is there any justification at all that could prioritise tourists over residents for living space?

Tourists are seen as a way to generate revenue for a city while not incurring the sorts of costs in services that residents do. Similar motivations cause cities to build office buildings without corresponding homes.

Empirically it seems like cities value tourists over residents -- if cities actually wanted residents, they'd approve construction of housing for them.

And in many cases they HAVE approved construction of housing for them but the new (very slight and only relative) market slack is being eaten up by commercial operators on Airbnb.

> Tourists are seen as a way to generate revenue for a city while not incurring the sorts of costs in services that residents do.

How does that work? Don't tourists use the same infrastructure?

Tourists don't usually use schools or social services. This page suggests those make up 50% of the budget:

http://gothamist.com/2013/04/11/interactive_chart_nycs_budge...

(I'm assuming "debt" and "pensions" are allocated proportionally.)

Tourism still incurs some costs, and a common solution to this is hotel taxes to pay for those costs. AirBNB dodges those taxes. Also, since AirBNB converts housing constructed for residents into tourist housing regardless of legality, it doesn't matter much which cities value more.

I can't help but think this whole thing could be solved by charging hotel taxes on AirBNB room nights. Can someone explain why it's not that simple?

AirBnB does not share who's renting rooms. A significant share of the hosts use that to dodge taxes. Now AirBnB could collect and forward those taxes but well, they have no incentive to.

I assume that hotel/car rental/occupancy taxes are just an easy way to generate revenue for the government without affecting local voters. Is there any relation between hotel tax and government services consumed by hotel guests? I'd be surprised if there were.

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