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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing. I viewed this as "How did the hotel lobby beat the AirBnB lobby given that AirBnB hosts have so many more voters?" I still view it as a shame, but it's a little more complicated.

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For every Airbnb host voting for them, there are potentially dozens of neighbors who want them to stop hosting.

They ran a pro campaign claiming rentals were being turned I into hotels

Which they were.

Yeah. I had my place on there and one guest was surprised that I actually lived in my apartment.

I'd view it as apartment renters and (especially) non-AirBnB host condo/co-op owners have even more voters than AirBnB hosts.

Are the renters locals or out of towners? My (uninformed) impression was that AirBnB is more out of towners than long term locals. (I know a lot of folks who used it for business trips)

The intent of my comment (which wasn't worded well) is that non-AirBnBing long-term residents or would-be residents (whether renting or owning) outnumber the hosters.

I've seen a couple examples of folks doing 3-6 month AirBnB renting instead of looking for and dealing with the apartment market.

One friend in Italy negotiated to have the owner eventually just lease their unit for which they had a long-term AirBnB thing going.

Interesting to see where this all goes in time.

I can't speak for NYC, but Vancouver is looking to ban AirBnB due in part to the displacing effect it has on long term locals. In an ultra-low vacancy rental market, every AirBnB unit takes a badly-needed apartment out of the rental pool.

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