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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Part of the issue is that being a landlord for short-term tenants is very different than being a landlord for long-term tenants. There's a misconception that "well, if we ban STRs, then they'll have to rent long-term. Checkmate." In many municipalities that have banned short-term rentals (particularly vacation destinations with many second homes), many landlords would just say "okay, I'm not renting at all then."

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Well, they don't _have_ to rent long-term but if the unit is kept unoccupied, then they will be hit with the Empty Homes Tax in Vancouver, for instance. So yeah, they are forcing the landlords hand here.

And yes, I agree the house problem is a supply-vs-demand issue. And this is not addressing the core problem. But in a place with extremely low rent vacancy [2], having units removed from the market for STR isn't helping.

[1]: https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t... [2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rent-prices-rose-in-2023-1....

The empty homes tax is a joke. It's too easy to bypass (just have somebody you know use it as their primary address and add a few lamps on timers) and priced too low (in many cases the tax is cheaper than the costs of having long term tenants).

The way to reduce the number of airbnbs is to allow more hotels to be built and in better parts of the cities.

The idea that full-time airbnbs could ever complete with the brutal efficiency of the hotel industry is crazy, but again, the only reason why AirBnB exists is to capture the some of the real estate value created by the artificial real estate shortage.

> allow more hotels to be built

This won’t solve the problem because AirBnB is a fundamentally different lodging stock that meets different market demands. A traditional hotel cannot reasonably accommodate a group of friends / a few families that want to stay together, cook together, eat, and recreate in the same living space.

The most a hotel can usually offer is a sad suite with an efficiency kitchen. More often it’s connected rooms with Grandma and Grandpa three floors away and another Aunt and Uncle in the other tower of the hotel.

I mean, I both disagree, and reject the point regardless. The vast majority of instances of vacationers could be supplied by hotels if it were easy and legal to build multi-unit hotels. If there are use cases where Airbnb is superior, so be it but demand for Airbnb units would drop significantly if the vast majority of folks can stay in a hotel for a better price-to-product value.

for real. small time landlording is a drag, living under damocles' sword, one bad tenant or calamity away from getting months of your life ruined. small time airbnb renting is just gravy in comparison.

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