Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption
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"don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring"
"lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety"
"hell of noise and violence and shady goings"
"don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered"
"credit card and not have that card cloned"
"drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves"
"used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments"
"fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs"
Given this exemption, it makes me question why exactly AirBnB was so up in arms about this, especially with their rhetoric being centered on protecting the little guy. That being said, I love the service, though if I had more cash I'd take a hotel every time.
Well, one obvious problem is that losing a big subset of your business is always bad.
But another problem, which I just found, is that these fine points of the law, if they exist, are nowhere to be seen on the web. All the immediately obvious Google hits paraphrase the law as "AirBnB and Craigslist short-term rentals now illegal in NYC". So that's a first-order marketing problem.
It also adds fuel to the FUD fire, as we are seeing right here in the linked article. Suddenly every AirBnB host is being accused of running a flea-infested, credit-card-scamming, fire-hazard rat trap. That's a second-order marketing problem, but it could prove even worse than the first-order one: The law only applies in NYC, but FUD can spread everywhere.
Finally, there are the legal problems. This law gives the cops, and whoever tips off the cops, a lever with which to hassle AirBnB guests and hosts alike. Just because you're ultimately going to be found innocent doesn't mean that being hassled by the cops is a barrel of fun. If it happens to any extent it's bound to hurt the reputation of services like AirBnB, especially among foreign travelers, who are probably damn scared of American police as it is.
And, of course, to prevent a raft of lawsuits AirBnB must now carefully educate its NYC hosts about the law, and pay a lawyer to draft an airtight agreement for the hosts to sign to indicate that they understand the law, and defend any lawsuits that spring up when people get busted in NYC and blame AirBnB anyway despite all those precautions...
One's marketing and PR posture does not necessarily mirror the totality of one's business. If I was planting an article in the New York Times, it would focus on a poor Hispanic girl learning at a NYC school which has a number who loves school now rather than on a middle class white boy learning at a suburban Illinois school which has a name who got a candied apple at the Halloween party last year. Two true stories, but the one which pays the rent is not the one that gives NYT reporters weak knees.
This does seem to alleviate any legitamate concerns about the bill, as long as renters count as owners (ie, if I have a free room in my apartment, I can put it on AirBnB)
If its only _owners_, though, its quite draconian, as most NYC building owners don't live in their buildings.
This means people that go on vacation cannot take in renters.
(Sorry, your point was a bit lost in all the FUD that was in that article.)
2 people going in the exact opposite direction and wanting to living in the other person's home. Seems slim chance to me unless those people knew each other in advance.
add - bluesmoon, learn something everyday. Though I think not all everybody wants to open their own apt for swap and instead would rather rent someone's for a week or 2.
Less likely to work internationally, but domestically, it happens. It's the key exchange that's the hard part, but the safest is to leave the key with a neighbour and then call them from the other side to give them the okay.
Swapping homes is far more common than renting a room for a week. It's more common outside the US sites like gumtree, leboncoin, etc. have been doing this for years
All the same. There's a reason that hotels have to be licensed, and it's because people occasionally die if they're not.
Do you consider the board of health restaurant inspections to be a bad idea?
Show us something that backs up your statement. People die all the time. Even from things that are heavily regulated and licensed.
I never said that or implied that.
We are talking about places to stay, not restaurants(food). Don't change the topic.
If someone were to visit and stay in your apartment for a few days, then somehow it becomes unsafe?
Stop with the black/white nonsense, everybody in this whole thread agrees that it shouldn't be a big deal to sublet for a couple months or have a house guest. That's qualitatively different from running an unlicensed hotel.
I was never arguing what to call 'short term rentals' or whatever you want to call it. I am questioning why it's unsafe and why the FUD (in the article) and where is the proof.
If you have lots of friends and you let them visit often, does your apartment become unsafe? Or is it really when you start charging them money that it becomes unsafe? (I am NOT referring to trying to cram all your friends into your apartment and having a wild party. I mean 1-4 friends visiting at a time.)
Such an idea probably won't happen because of the aformentioned hotel lobbyists, though.
Both PG's comment and Barmstrong's make sense and flow to me; the "yep" signifying agreement with the AirBnB complement before extending commentary on the linkbait aspect: an addendum if you will. I don't see why, or how, Barmstrong's reply to PG would be read in the manner Projectileboy objects to - perhaps the dash could lead to such a reading but it's fairly difficult to arrive at.
full disclosure: the startup I work at uses AirBNB when we bring in potential new hires, unless they insist on a hotel. We have never had anything but the absolute best experience, and I haven't spoken to anyone who has used it that didn't become an evangelist for it. But I guess paranoia and hypothetical boogy men trumps empirical data over at tech-crunch.
If I were planning to interview with a company and they suggested I use the service, I would get the impression the company is cheap beyond practicality, and find a way to politely back out of the interview.
There's obviously a market for people who don't mind sleeping with strangers but I'm definitely not in it. I'm way too paranoid that I would get robbed.
The credit card cloning example from the original article would probably be my biggest fear. I'd be checking my credit card purchases multiple times a day for weeks I'm sure. While actually there I'm sure I would put my wallet, phone and anything else that's valuable in a bag and sleep on top of it. It wouldn't be a very relaxing night's sleep just before an interview.
On the other hand, hostels tend to be cheaper than AirBnB and I have no problems sleeping there.
I'm just as paranoid about the dorm option.
I'm used hostels (& couch surfing) quite a lot and never really had problems, but I guess it depends on the region you are traveling in.
Tallanvor's approach seems unnecessarily paranoid to me, but I don't know where he travels too.
I considered using AirBnB for a trip I just booked to Greece, but I decided against it. For several reasons:
1. I don't know how clean the place will be. With a 3 or 4 star hotel with good reviews online, I can be fairly certain I'll get a place that is clean. 2. I don't know how secure the place will be. The rooms I booked all have in room safes, so I can leave my netbook in my room and be fairly certain it will be there when I get back. 3. Getting a private apartment on AirBnB isn't that much cheaper than a hotel. No offense to the hosts offering a room in their place or their couch, but when I'm on vacation, I don't want to share a place with people I don't know. I'm just not that type of person.
All of that adds up to general uncertainty over the use of AirBnB. And if a company I was interviewing with wanted me to use AirBnB to find a place to stay, well, that would give me serious reservations as to whether or not I'd want to work there. The possible exception would be if I were interviewing with AirBnB themselves.
I just moved across country. I stayed at 3 different places of Airbnb over the course of 2 weeks while I looked for a place with roommates off Craigslist. Each host was great and I never felt anything but safe. The only reason I stayed at multiple is because they had other bookings coming in so I couldn't extend.
I have stayed in 100s of shared hostel rooms, never had a problem. I have heard stories, we all have heard stories, but they are so minor to be negligible. You are in more danger getting to the hostel/house than you are once you are there.
I suggest you actually get out more and experience people, share a room, it is a great way to stop your foolish attitude. If you have a car, then you are already way to cut off from the real world.
I agree that suggesting airbnb would be a turnoff. But this is not why, at least not for me.
Frugality: "If at all possible, I'd prefer if you used airbnb. If you don't want to, that's cool."
Cheapness: "We won't spend more than $50 a night in San Francisco."
Frugality is better applied to ink cartridges than employee comforts, IMO.
On the other hand, when he's hired, he should expect to be made comfortable: don't skimp on chairs, displays, airconditioning, etc. Whether that's the case should become clear during the interview: it's also about "do I want to work here?"
Choosing functional real estate can certainly be fine. But what would you think of a startup that chose Oakland over SF to save even more money?
My salary? No, I don't want the feeling that they're going to knock me down to as low as I'll accept, I've worked hard to develop my skills and I deserve a paycheck. The OP's company could spend an extra 100 bucks per interview and have way higher odds of a good impression from the interviewee. It's like tipping really well when you order your first drink and getting good service for the rest of the night, first impressions matter.
The OP's company could spend an extra 100 bucks per interview and have
way higher odds of a good impression from the interviewee
I'd rather see them save 12*100 bucks, so they can buy me a decent chair when they hire me.
The issue isn't even the 100 bucks, it's the fact that they're telegraphing that they don't know how important first impressions are, and they'll cheap out on me given the first opportunity.
As far as my sense of entitlement, well, what the market will bear and all that. It's not that I insist on 4-star lodging, it's that the company is sending a message by asking me to do AirBnB or couchsurfing or whatever. If this is a scrappy pre-funding startup with an awesome idea, ok, if I like the idea, I'll play ball. If it's a business that wants to hire me as an employee, that's different.
You have to wonder how many of your interviewees were thinking along those lines when you made the offer.
Cheap: "We won't pay you overtime for business trips."
I think that services like that are important right now, and I'm glad that they exist.
There's nothing wrong with being cheap. That's why I included the phrase "beyond practicality."
How much are you spending to fly out the applicant? How many man hours will be spent on the interview process? If you're willing to risk these investments to save $50, I consider that impractical.
Of course, this is from my point of view: I presuppose that 'where you stay' is irrelevant, because I consider it irrelevant. If I have to sleep on a couch in the founder's living room, so be it. Perhaps you are right that one should best err on the safe side of caution by providing a hotel. Nobody's ever been fired for providing a hotel room :P
The article doesn't make any sense to me.
Why would you even bother taking the opinion of such a biased source seriously?
Any time someone trots out the tired old argument of "well, with big huge companies, you have recourse if something goes bad", I always want to know which big company X they're talking about. Whether it's dealing with the DMV, trying to get JDBC driver bug fixes from Oracle, trying to get billing questions answered from Comcast, or trying to get the shower in you room fixed at a <major hotel chain here>, big organizations simply aren't organized around their customers. There may be legitimate reasons to pick a major hotel chain over AirBnB or the like, but customer satisfaction hardly seems like the best avenue of attack.
But of course none of this is rocket science... Whenever an industry resorts to competing through legislation, they aren't fighting the good fight to provide you with a better quality of life.
And you were free to do that already, why force everyone else? (what is that again hotel lobby?)
That government licensing will protect you from these better than the market is an untested assumption.
Actually, that isn't true.
Many building code laws (and by extension hotel laws requiring fire escape access etc) were enacted because of large scale urban fires (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fire_safety_legislat..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Baltimore_Fire#Legacy).
In general, building codes and related safety regulations for hotels have strong scientific and engineering testing behind them.
It's true that these regulations are often imperfect. But it is also true that they have been tested and proven to be better than the absence of them.
However, safety, like anything else is a tradeoff. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe building. Even if you were to make it totally safe, it would be too expensive to use or construct.
You want safety? Just how much are you willing to pay?
Given that safety costs, it is usually appropriate that government regulates the minimum acceptable standard.
Beyond that, the market decides (see some active safety features in cars etc)
MGM Grand Hotel fire, 1980.
To restate: one of the justifications for regulating landlords is the possibility that they may offer unsuitable, even unsafe housing, in desperate circumstances. But where's the evidence that this is happening in the short-term rental market?
Gathering statistics for short term home/apartment rentals would be rather tricky. But apartment fires seem a frequent enough occurrence: http://cbs5.com/local/fatal.fire.firefighters.2.1823700.html... of 8 died in fire while family visiting relatives in San Jose); http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/fairfield_cty/dozens-displaced-...; http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=11656807; http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/24388077/detail.html.
I have no opinion on the relative dangers of fires to residents vs short-term visitors, nor am I saying that regulation of short-term lets is necessary. I posted only to respond to the general contention that the market makes safety regulation unnecessary or superfluous.
Airbnb's founder is himself living on Airbnb for the next coupla months (or even indefinitely - though he doesn't say). If that isn't a plus for dependability, I don't know what is.
Edit: here's the first blog post - http://blog.airbnb.com/living-on-airbnb-0
That's more Couchsurfing's territory. There are plenty of shares on AirBnB, but whole apartments and even buildings are commonly listed too.
As an example of the type of people that would/will abuse AirBnB and similar services I submit this article describing my last landlord: http://www.tenant.net/Other_Areas/Massachusetts/jaffe.html . It is dated 1994, but they are still up to the same tricks 16 years later (I lived in one of their houses for the last year). I can't imagine the field day they would have if they knew about AirBnB and the like.
second response, Techcrunch has become the Fox News of technology blogs.
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Here, we have 2 reasons that Paterson and the New York State Assembly/Senate got involved:
1) There is a legitimate public health concern with running unlicensed hotels -- subletting your 2 bedroom for a couple months is one thing, renting places in order to run a business out of them while circumventing health regs that are there for good reason is something entirely different. They were seeing a shift to the latter.
2) Simultaneously, hotels have money, have lobbyists, didn't like this and had a great argument to make with public health. The senator in question can keep the donations flowing while all the while claiming he's only concerned about the public welfare.
So, some mixture of that is what happened. Notice how none of it involved Glenn Beck's nightmare socialist conspiring to reduce "freedom" and expand "government" in order to, you know, piss off Glenn Beck or whatever motivates all of those socialists. When you unpack political reality, it turns out to be a lot less about "government vs private sector" and a lot more a combination of who has the money (usually one aspect of the private sector).
Edit: as noted below, the implied question is: what "legimate health concerns" exist for short-term renting but not couchsurfing?
I thought it would be instructive for people who talk about "government" as if just putting the word big in front of it solves the issue, and the solution is cut taxes for rich people. None of that has anything to do with this. This is a concrete policy change in a specific area.
If you allow people to not be present at all, then some will turn this into a business and operate a real hotel room, 365 days a year. Operated like a cheap hotel. I can see why the government may want to regulate that.
An easy way to distinguish the above situation from legitimate friends staying over, is to ask for the owner to be present. Or couchsurfing. That tends to make it a more casual and better controlled environment. I can understand why the government may want to stay out of this.
My impression is that the real criteria should be how much the room is rented: if you have guests 300 days a year, you should be regulated. If it's 10 days, leave me alone. The problem is that it's probably hard to define, and may impose its own set of requirements (such as, everyone would have to keep a registry of all visitors, just to prove that they don't fall into the hotel category).
I don't think this is a totally absurdly black and white case, it's no oppressive regime rearing its ugly head. Both sides have ulterior motives (AirBnB and the established hotels), but their arguments aren't totally without merit. And one thing that people keep forgetting, is that this law isn't breaking new grounds, both renting and hotels are pretty heavily regulated, mostly for a good reason. Yes, for the hard-core magical hand of the market libertarians this is another nail in the coffin, but I bet that a lot of people that get too angry in this discussion don't have problems with laws against arbitrary landlord decisions or hotel health and emergency codes.
Let's keep this reasonable…
Says who and what are those reasons? I suspect the reasons are: old people got scared and stakeholders saw an opportunity.
Luckily the Internet is mostly protected from scared old people and powerful stakeholders.
Maybe in another decade when we're all older we will be willing to give up the freedoms we once enjoyed when the Internet was still young. And it will be for "mostly good reasons."
Remember the old silent movies, where the evil, mustachioed landlord was one the most popular villainous archetypes? That wasn't without reason. People looking for a roof over their heads often aren't in a good bargaining position, so often you could make them sign almost any contract. There are quite a few federal and local laws that limit what's possible in all these cases, so that your landlord e.g. can't evict you all willy-nilly. Rent control is also rather common.
Same goes for hotels, especially when it comes to security (emergency exits, maximum occupancy etc.).
Whether every single law (including this new once) make sense is another question, but my point is that this isn't something completely new, were all of a sudden the octogenarians ruling the world decided to come down on the poor cyber-startups.
What that doesn't mean is freedom to gather with a bunch of friends where and whenever you want. What it does mean is the legal right to stage peaceful protests or gather in public (with reasonable restrictions).
If needed I can run over to the library and grab you a list of cases on that, but I think you'll have trouble finding any for "couchsurfing."
What does a vacationing transient care about pissing in the hallway? He'll be gone in 8 hours. AirBNB ignores the reality that apartments are part of shared property. That shared property maintains its state of repair thanks to people from the building having large stakes in making sure they don't leave human feces in the stairwell.
(EDIT begins): The above paragraph is not only "not a good comparison," but a really bad comparison which entirely misses the point and argues against the below paragraphs (as jbooth's comment succinctly points out). It's only still here because I don't like deleting text I've posted; I still support most of it (especially it being common courtesy not to cause discomfort to your hosts, regardless of any regulations or laws regulating behavior), even though the basic idea is horrible. You should disregard it, and focus on the paragraphs below. (EDIT ends)
However, if you are going to get up in arms about the potential for noisy guests, and require legislation to prevent it in some way, it makes far more sense, to me, to empower apartment owners to kick out anyone who sublets an apartment to noisy guests, and allow legal recourse for the people in surrounding apartments if this does not occur. A system of incentives would thus be created for people renting out a spare room to make sure to educate their visitors about the behavioral standards they are expected to follow, and to enforce these standards. This would create greater freedom for everyone, and the owner of the building has the option of stipulating that short-term sub-letting is not permitted in whatever contract they have with their renters.
The problem of actual unlicensed hotels - a set of rooms lived in by no one but short-term renters - is entirely different, and is the problem which should be removed by legislation. It's also the problem which many of the people who are against AirBnB and similar sites are thinking of; there is a world of difference between a group of tourists given free reign in an apartment and one or two tourists renting a bedroom from someone who is living in and present in the apartment. This difference is perhaps why so many of the people who have tried such services are in favor of it; they have been in the latter situation, which seemed quite pleasant to them and which was completely preferable to hotels (all of the stories I've heard of users of such services describe this situation). The people who are angry about it (outside of the hotel industry) without actually coming into contact with it (short-term renting of the adjacent apartment, with whatever results) are thinking of the first situation.
Or at least, that seems to be the case, from reading many of the comments on this article. It's quite likely that I'm misunderstanding something, of course.
Dear god I read your entire post only to realize you entirely agree with the legislation that was just passed only you have no idea what the new law means.
You can let someone crash at your house if you're away, but you cannot charge.
(Also: previous comment edited to incorporate exactly how terrible the comparison was. It was really more of a jumping-off point for the rest of my musings ...)
if it were much more calm, with rational arguments and justifications, i might actually agree, or at least agree to disagree.