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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone loves a boogieman. The reason rents are high are not because of short term rentals. They are high because of inflation and globalization.

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AirBnB isn't the only factor in rising rent costs, but it's pretty evident that it's a contributing factor:

"AirBnB has increased the median long term rent in New York City by 1.4% in the last three years, resulting in a $380 rent increase for the median New York tenant" [https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attac...]

"When demand is inelastic, even relatively small changes in housing supply can cause significant changes in the cost of housing.10 This intuition is clearly validated in a number of careful empirical studies looking precisely at the effect of Airbnb introduction and expansion on housing costs." [https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...]

"At the median owner-occupancy rate zipcode, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices. Considering the median annual Airbnb growth in each zipcode, these results translate to an annual increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in house prices for the median zipcode in our data, which accounts for about one fifth of actual rent growth and about one seventh of actual price growth" [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832]

Sure, but a minor contributing factor -- not a major one. And therefore a distraction from the root cause.

A median $380 increase is not minor, nor is accounting for one fifth of rent growth.

In high touristy areas you cannot buy a house at all at normal...ish prices, because buyers are overpaying a lot, becase they intend to rent it out via airbnb, so locals are getting pushed out of those areas.

What's so wrong with houses and apartments being for locals and long-term stay, and tourists just staying in hotels?

There’s nothing wrong with what you propose but it doesn’t offer a get-rich scheme, which is what really fuels short-term rental growth. It’s the new house flipping.

If you are travelling as a single person or a couple hotels sure. As a family the hotel experience is really bad or out of reach price wise. I'm just about to go on a vacation and we looked into hotels vs airbnb quite extensively. We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms. For the same as OK looking motel we can stay in a nice house with parking and a good size kitchen.

I don't want to like AirBnb and similar, but every time we've tried to go back to hotel or traditional B&B the experience has been poor and expensive. I guess the alternative is to not travel at all... we don't very often and we're only visiting a city in the same (small) country and also seeing friends so it's not like I feel we're massively touristy people paying to travel half way around the world then skimping on the accommodation.

>We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't have kids. But, from my experience travelling with my parents when I was a kid... you really don't "need" three rooms.

That maybe the expectations you have now, but using AirBnb is pushing the externalities of those expectations onto the community you are visiting.

> We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.

What? I've stayed 6 deep in a single room with two beds. Mom, dad, and us four siblings. And there's more than a decade between the kids. Three hotel rooms would have been an unimaginable luxury.

I'm firmly in the camp of piling the family into one room. There's no better way to bond.

Cool. You travel your way and the other poster can do it his way. Everyone has their own level of comfort that they would like to accept on vacation.

But tourism is a luxury, and people renting out apartments on airbnb is making that apartment unafordable for long-term rental for locals, who actually have to live there. Sure, you might like the cheaper option of an unregulated hotel, but the locals would prefer you to just go to a normal hotel, since that's what the hotels were built for. At some point, even the local governments will have to bend over for the will off the 'masses' (compared to a few individuals profiteering from this), because people who have nowhere to live are in the group of people who have "nothing to lose anymore", and as a politician, you don't want a critical mass of those.

Bluntly put, access to affordable housing trumps affordable vacationing. If your problem is where to take your family for holidays, you are already out of touch with people struggling to find homes.

Ironically, you cite some other boogeymen. They are high mostly because not enough housing is being built to meet demand.

And the one that is being built is then rented out daily on sites like AirBnB instead of monthly/yearly to locals.

> Ironically, you cite some other boogeymen

Inflation is a fact. Globalization is a fact. Money is flowing from the entire planet into the US to find stable places to store it.

If money is flowing to the US to buy real estate, I say good. That’s more money being pumped into our economy, more money going to local communities via property taxes. Let’s build more real estate meet this demand.

Some places are more affected by AirBnB than others. Seattle? Nope. Paris Bastille district? A few years ago definitely.

And a lack of supply that is pushed by owners. (Not just AirBnb owners, all owners)

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