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Comment by matchbok | Hacker News Reader

Amazing what a company can do when they ignore regulations and simply extract wealth out of our communities. 80% of their profit comes from huge corporate listings yet they advertise themselves as a "home-sharing" site. Nonsense.

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Vancouver brought in regulations to try to regulate Airbnb into actually behaving like the service is intended, that is to ensure that people are simply renting out other rooms in their residence and are not buying condos with the explicit purpose of renting them out full time like virtual hotels.

It's abundantly clear that Airbnb has zero interest in helping Vancouver enforce these rules. Vancouver has had to struggle to enforce its rules and is failing at doing so.

It's not Airbnb's responsibility to enforce the law. Full stop.

Demonstrating compliance with the law can be and often is a legal requirement itself.

There aren't any laws here for Airbnb to comply with. That's my point: the regulations are on the hosts. If the Government wants to regulate Airbnb, they need to pass legislation that requires Airbnb to do something. Exactly as they did with YouTube via DMCA.

You are just incorrect. For example, Airbnb was required to comply with host registration and caps on short stay rentals in San Francisco (e.g. discussed in [0]). Airbnb is legally required to demonstrate its own compliance, separately from what laws govern hosts themselves.

It seems premature to claim whether Airbnb is subject to more laws like this or not. Many cities have enacted new regulations or sued Airbnb over failures to comply with existing laws, and it seems like a complex legal issue still in the midst of being hashed out.

[0]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Airbnb-loses-th...

Dude, that was my entire point. Airbnb was required, via legislation, to do something, thus they are doing it. Advocating that they do something without being required to is what I'm commenting on.

I think we’re talking past one another. Nobody is saying Airbnb must demonstrate compliance with laws they are not subject to. Instead, I’m saying they might be required to demonstrate compliance with existing laws (not special new laws) if various city-led lawsuits against them end up revealing that Airbnb had been subject to various types of regulation all along (despite Airbnb’s insistence to the contrary).

There are many jurisdictions where this is an extremely dangerous assumption. Knowingly facilitating illegal transactions is often a crime.

Do you have a case where Airbnb is being charged with doing that?

"“It will potentially require home-sharing sites like Airbnb and their hosts to comply with local hospitality rules in every city in the United States,” Stemler told PacerMonitor. “It could also make home sharing sites responsible under the Civil Rights Act and the American with Disabilities Act. They would also have to comply with just about any law or restriction that a local government maintains pertaining to hotels.”"

https://www.pacermonitor.com/articles/2018/08/02/airbnb-host...

It's not a murderer's responsibility to stop themselves from murdering people. Full stop.

What a dumb response. Airbnb isn't going to do something it's not required to. Suggesting that they have a moral responsibility to enforce the law on hosts is silly. If you want them to build a system that assists law enforcement, pass legislation that requires they do.

So ebay doesn't have to prevent people from selling illegal guns? YouTube doesn't have to prevent people from illegally distributing copyrighted material?

Both of those exist because regulators forced them to. The suggestion here, apparently, is that Airbnb should just do it out of the kindness of their heart. If the government wants more oversight, regulate them.

> they ignore regulations and simply extract wealth out of our communities

Can you elaborate on this?

I'm not the person you are asking but I'll lay out how I understand this argument from what I've read about the housing market in Portland, OR, which has a big housing crisis right now.

Available housing, apartments, condos, etc, is being eaten up by short-term renters. The price of short-term rentals are more expensive than long-term rentals, but due to so much inventory not being free for long-term rentals, the price for long-term rentals has gone up a lot. This is the same inflation that we see in the expected vacation destinations but in non-traditional locations, like Portland and it's suburbs.

AirBnB is supposedly built to empower individuals to post a rental here or there. What has been found is that it has enabled and encouraged individuals and companies with large inventories to convert long-term rentals into short-term ones. And that 15% that AirBnB takes is simply passed onto the consumer - which then affects the price of long-term rentals.

Ditto for Toronto

Ditto for Prague

Airbnb makes no effort to control the legal aspect of people letting appartments on their site, nor do they give tax agencies the means to collect taxes. In fact, at some point, they offered their european renters to collect earnings on nameless credit cards from Gibraltar.

There is also the negative effect of renting prices going up, or having your neighbour replaced with 3-4 party organizers a month.

They aren’t “extracting wealth” from communities any more than Booking.com does. In fact, AirBnB creates wealth. A person renting out a room on AirBnB is economically better off than if they didn’t.

Incorrect. They are removing apartments from the supply, thus raising rents. A couple airbnbs in a huge apartment building have many external costs that are carried by the other tenants.

> In fact, AirBnB creates wealth

Building something creates wealth. Changing the channel through which payment occurs doesn't create wealth. The host's revenue comes from displacing hotels; the guest's savings come from increased rent for other tenants. If you consider the negative externalities imposed on neighbors, there'd be a stronger argument that AirBnB destroys wealth.

>extract wealth out of communities

Yeah, you don’t have an axe to grind here, I’m sure.

What's that supposed to mean? Do you think this person was the literal, direct victim of such practices, and as such "has a [personal] axe to grind?" If so, although it exhibits bias, it also exhibits the phenomenon.

That being said, there are _many_ communities upset by AirBnB's influence on their area. Example: https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_ad1c91a...

Of course, Googling for that article turns up, primarily, AirBnB listings in New Orleans.

I have an axe to grind against mini-hotels that operate without regulation that raise rents for everyone while providing massive money to a small number of interests.

So yeah.

So, you're mad at Airbnb because the government isn't regulating it properly?

Because it's only illegal because it's not regulated "properly?"

Airbnb isn't doing anything illegal, the hosts are. If New York wants to put forward legislation that obligates Airbnb to develop a system for tracking that, great. But they aren't going to do it unless they have to.

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