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Comment by weeksie | Hacker News Reader

It's not about people being uncomfortable with others in the building (a valid complaint, however).

It's about cities like NYC that have less than one percent vacancy rates, where a couple of AirBNB related effects put upward pressure on rents:

1) A person can stay in an apartment they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, pushing rents up (I personally know several people who maintain apartments like this, either by leaving for a couple days per month or maintaining an apartment after moving out of town.)

2) A full apartment stays off the market because it is being used as a dedicated hotel

Both of these make a difference in rent prices, though it's hard to say how much.

I'd be happy to see a ban on AirBNB while residential vacancy rates are lower than 3%. I love the service but not what it does to my already pretty unaffordable city.

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Yes, it's true that in a city with an artificial housing scarcity like NYC, AirBnB alters the distribution of who gets to consume housing. It opens the market to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to purchase.

Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?

> Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?

There are lots of factors that impact housing supply and demand. Whether they should be regulated / stopped generally becomes a question once the public actively engages in discussing it (see foreign investment in the Pacific Northwest for an example).

Basically, if the public doesn't care, the politicians don't care. Since a pol's main incentive is to get re-elected, the issue has to become important to their constituents, otherwise it effectively doesn't matter.

Are you arguing that your analysis of what's right and wrong should rightly play second fiddle to a politician's chances of getting re-elected?

GP wasn't asking whether it would be prevented, merely whether it should.

Maybe an argument would be that, on balance, illegal immigration keeps cost down in the service industries. Those savings are realized at the local, neighborhood level in NYC (think your local bagel shop or bodega), while tourism and AirBnB tend to have less of a broader, distributed effect on commerce throughout the entire city. That's just one point. I guess on the other hand there is a cost of social services for illegal immigrants that would have to be quantified to make that argument. I don't know, it's complicated.

Maybe put another way, illegal immigrants are part of the community, so their presence in the housing market must be balanced against their role in a more complex system.

But if you are just asking about the nature of Justice, I don't have any thoughts on that.

Are you really comparing the downsides of converting residential units into hotels to forcing people into homelessness?

Because AirBNB use in NY amounts to economic rent-seeking. That is fundamentally different than disallowing a class of people to participate in the economy.

"Rent seeking"? I'm confused. AirBnB helps price goods closer to their market rate by expanding the market.

If anything, the people who don't want to compete on price with AirBnB are the ones who are rent seeking.

It's an economics term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

And you're misusing it.

Sorry mate, I don't think you have a good enough grasp on econ to have this discussion.

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