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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

I was in Budapest recently and had a very good experience with the host, but was already a bit perplexed that i was in contact with 3 different people over the course of the stay. In the end i realised that the host owns 25 properties in the city centre and probably has a dozen assistants to take care of stuff. It's a full blown tourism business and a problem for the local community at that point.

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I once lived in Amsterdam and during summer, my neighbourhood was overrun with loud Airbnb tourists coming and going at all hours of the night. As a resident it was an impossible situation for 2-3 months each year. I ended up leaving over it, it was affecting my ability to to my job. I learned (the hard way) why regulations and building codes exist.

I don't want to minimize your plight, sleeping above a commercial street can be a nightmare. And it's a bugger when your quiet neighborhood suddenly transforms into Tourist Ground Zero.

But cities do need to grow and expand. Quiet backstreets turn into busy boulevards. They have done so for millennia. The economic opportunities such transformation brings for the city far outstrip the cost of new sound insulating windows - not to mention that, for owners, those are more than covered by the appreciation of the property.

That's why I prefer a system where tourists and hosts pay for the creative destruction they do to residential areas, and put that revenue to good use for everybody else.

Cities have a process for growing and transforming neighborhoods from sleepy residential areas to "tourist ground zero", and that process does not involve waiting for Airbnb to decide which areas to do that to.

In Amsterdam it’s a broader issue, and excessive tourism is a big complaint by pretty much anyone native to Amsterdam. The city has recently put a halt to any further expansion of tourist shops / hotels / etc downtown, and on a national level we’re trying to get tourists to visit other parts of The Netherlands instead. This, in order to keep the authentic nature of the city, and ensure the city still caters to locals as well.

These kind of rules is something all businesses need to adhere to, and I see no reason why Airbnb should be an exception.

So auction the tourist lodging right like taxi medallions, to hotels and home bnbs alike. The move you describe will likely enrich the hotels that already exist downtown without any benefit to the city.

Sure, those kind of things are a possibility. The point I was making is that Airbnb needs to play by the same rules as everyone.

But they don't, do they? The whole point of these "rent 90 days a year, apply for a new license every year" laws is to impose an onerous burden on Bnbs that traditional suppliers either don't face or can amortize over hundreds of rooms.

It's laughable to require a single rented room the same paperwork that a large hotel requires, then say that enables them to "play by the same rules as everyone else". They are a fundamentally different way to provide the same economic service and the law needs to adapt, not protect traditional interests.

How is that a problem?

I would guess it’s a zoning issue, it’s an issue to the extent communities have a right to do zoning at all

It's probably a management company, the host might be the owner or just a worker of that company

Sounds like it created a lot of jobs in the local community. How is that a problem exactly? You would prefer if they didn't hire assistants?

When you eat up the marginal supply of housing it can greatly increase the cost for everyone vs adding a couple dozen low wage jobs for which they’ll also have trouble affording to pay rent themselves. Tourists are not paying taxes to the city, their needs should come second to the citizens that live there.

I don't think it is quite accurate to say that tourists are not paying taxes.

Tourists patronize all sorts of businesses (lodging, transportation, entertainment, food, retail) and those businesses are paying taxes. The revenue from tourists is part of that business equation. Of course there are also specific taxes paid by tourists (airport fees, port fees, hotel room taxes, rental car taxes) as well as regular transactional taxes paid by everyone (sales/service/vat).

The marginal supply of housing argument is often a bit ridiculous. Many cities will give their best real estate to hotels and create entire neighborhoods where locals can basically not find housing. Meanwhile some Airbnbs interspersed through the city is the thing driving up housing cost. Just start converting hotels into apartments and you've solved the problem.

You say "tourists are not paying taxes to the city" which is certainly wrong for San Francisco and for most other cities I've travelled to as well. In San Francisco, there is a 14% occupancy tax and it is taken by Airbnb automatically during booking as they do in hundreds of cities. Compare this to Craigslist where I used to rent and nobody ever mentioned paying tax once.

Finally, many of these cities literally have tourism as their number one industry. Its a bit dangerous to start saying that the people who fund your city are second class citizens since they only pay occupancy taxes and not income taxes. In fact many of the areas against Airbnb like Miami Beach have bent over so far backwards for tourists that all they care about are the hotels now.

Taxes in SF are about $3,300 per capita ($2.7b). Hotel taxes bring in $300m revenue, basically what it costs the city for it’s homeless budget. Also tourists are not voters they have no long term interest in the city, cities should be prioritizing around the residents not tourists.

No, converting hotels into apartments doesn't solve the problem. The total amount of spaced used by Airbnb and hotels combined is too small compared to the need for housing; the only thing that solves the problem is removing the height limits, and letting people put up taller buildings.

Rents in Budapest increased ~50% or so in the past couple of years.

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