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Comment by glup | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground here — where households have the flexibility to rent out part of their primary residence, on a limited basis (either temporal or just part of the house), subject to clear and evenly enforced regulations. This is a pre-internet idea (e.g., casas particulares in Cuba in the 1990s) that becomes way easier/safer/better with a web-based platform. Personally, I find it massively more fun to stay in a typical home in a region that I'm visiting, and I can often find these on AirBnB.

Of course AirBnB is going to try to grow as much as possible to try to eat hotel revenues and develop new markets. But shouldn't communities have the right to combat the externalities that such growth entails?

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The line to draw seems pretty clear. If you're renting out a portion of your primary residence (or a subunit of your primary residence like a basement apartment or guest house) then that's fine.

If there is no permanent resident in the dwelling and it's being managed by a 3rd party, it's a hotel and should be subject to all the regulations other hotels are.

Building codes already have a delineation for these different types of properties.

I suspect that partial apartment rentals are far less disruptive. It's full apartment rents that are causing issues.

I think this also comes back to over tourism. Travel is the new materialism. It used to be you kept up with the Jones by buying new cars, new jewellery, new houses. Now it's by going away, frequently and to the most exotic places, to prove how open minded and wordly you are. And it's killing the planet and many local communities. There will be a backlash eventually.

A lot of tourism is also cheaper because of cheap airfares/lowish fuel prices. Probably Airbnb can also make traveling a bit cheaper for those who use it. Economies of many of the countries in which and from which people travel a lot are fairly strong.

>Travel is the new materialism.

Maybe? I know there is the whole experiences over things mantra. Maybe that's in play. On the other hand, maybe there's less interest in big McMansions but the apartment/condo in a lot of major cities is--as can be seen in other comments--pretty expensive by historical patterns. If tourism were down instead, we'd be hearing arguments that young people who have fewer other obligations aren't traveling because they have no money.

In any case, I have trouble seeing tourism as a particular source of the world's problems.

"Travel is the new materialism."

I wanna argue with this -- I think some portion of the population has a deep-seated psychological personal need to travel for their own internal well-being rather than to perform travel for an audience as a status symbol. But I think there's a pretty strong case that especially with the rise of social media, travel's become much more tightly linked with attention and status.

But travel is relatively new idea to much of the population. We don't realise how little folk used to travel because those who did travel are disproportionately famous.

That's the NYC law, dating to pre-AirBnB times but now with new relevance. It distinguishes 'taking in a boarder' from 'subletting the apartment'. If you occupy the unit as your primary residence, you're allowed to take in boarders, defined as people with whom you intend to share the common spaces. So renting out a room in your apartment is fine (as long as you don't do some weird partitioning to make it de-facto a separate unit... you're supposed to be essentially welcoming a guest into your own household, even if it's a paid guest). But you can't do a whole-apartment sublet for periods shorter than 30 days.

The biggest difficulty here is enforcement. You can create laws based around how frequently a residence is rented or whether it's the full residence rented or merely part of the residence but then you need to actually enforce those laws. Is enforcement based around income taxes from the renter? Or reporting from Airbnb itself of what's available on the site? Do local governments have to setup a small team or even an entire agency to watch this stuff? Cities need to budget for this enforcement. This stuff is hard.

Even if every popular tourist city immediately passed legislation to limit Airbnb practices it could be years or decades before they figure out the details of making that policy into reality.

Berlin will be the testing ground here - the exact limitations you describe in your comment are imposed right now in Berlin. Whether or not AirBnB succeeds under these regulations will reveal how such a model will fare in other jurisdictions.

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