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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

The right answer seems to be somewhere in the middle but neither side has put forth anything reasonable.

For one thing, HOAs and landlords should have pretty liberal abilities to forbid short-term rentals and pretty much all have.

Renting out a room where the owner/tenant is present should be allowed on a limited basis (perhaps several weeks/months per year).

Renting out a full residence in a non-zoned area should be allowed on a more limited basis (perhaps up to 1 month per year).

Just like on Ebay, et al, "casual sellers" should be able to execute some limited amount of quasi-business activity before triggering all the business rules.

Finally, AirBnB-style rentals should be regulated more like BnBs (duh!) than hotels.

The question is, what's the right answer for these situations? And no kudos to AirBnB, et al for offering up no suggestions.

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If you own a property (or have the owner's permission), why does it matter whether you actually live in it or rent it out to other people? Should we be prohibited from lending our physical books to other people just because publishers would rather we didn't?

Why does it matter who you rent out your property to? Why does it matter whether you rent it out for 30 days a year or 300 days a year? Why does it matter whether you rent it out for 30 days to one person or one day each to 30 people? The last one is especially arbitrary, and the only reason it means anything at all is because the hotel industry uses it as a threshold for market segmentation.

Is it safety that matters? If so, let's drop all the "up to X days" bullshit and actually focus on safety. How can we check whether an AirBnB listing is "safe", whatever that means in this context, how do we compensate victims of "unsafe" listings, and how do we come up with a good incentive structure to encourage "safe" listings and weed out "unsafe" ones?

Is it taxation that matters? Of course people should pay taxes on all of their income. In fact, AirBnB income should be easier to track down than the proceeds from that MacBook you just sold on Craigslist. AirBnB keeps excellent records of all of your income (and their fees), after all. Then it's just a matter of getting those records into the hands of the IRS.

Is it zoning that matters? If so, why do we care about zoning at all? Over the last few decades, the only thing that zoning achieved in the United States is the complete segragation of residential areas from all other areas of modern life, so that everyone needs to drive a dozen miles to work and another dozen miles to get their groceries. Many cities are now beginning to toy with the idea of vibrant mixed zones, where people can live, work, shop, and play all within easy walking or cycling distances. A hostel next door suddenly doesn't seem like a bad idea after all. (Oh, it's not properly managed and people are shooting crack up their arms in the backyard? Well, that's a problem with poor management, not a problem with the mere fact that it's a hostel. Would you ban houses with basements because some basements have meth labs in them?)

So I refuse to believe that the right answer has anything to do with how long you should be able to rent out a property. It's your property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it within reasonable bounds (like paying taxes and keeping your property safe for other users).

As long as we keep focusing on peripheral issues that are framed by existing business models with conflicts of interest, we'll never get to ask the really pressing questions, such as reasonable safety and insurance standards for small-time landlords.

And yes, I agree with you that AirBnB's reactive (as opposed to proactive) attitude toward this issue isn't helping, either.

/rant

> Should we be prohibited from lending our physical books to other people just because publishers would rather we didn't?

No, but I haven't seen examples of negative externalities in that case.

Well, then find a way to make people pay for those externalities if and when they occur.

What I'm against is the assumption that renting out your home should be illegal by default, i.e. illegal unless you meet a bunch of conditions. This makes it difficult to ask how we might target specific instances of negative externality.

IMO, when it comes to what you can do with your own property, the assumption should be legal by default, i.e. legal except when a specific way of using your property has demonstrable negative externalities, and even in that case, only illegal to the extent to which your actions cause such externalities.

Illegal-by-default is anathema to innovation, because it places a buden on innovators to demonstrate that they are causing no harm. It's like a subtler version of guilty-until-proven-innocent.

> IMO, when it comes to what you can do with your own property, the assumption should be legal by default

It is. You may do almost anything with your property.

It just happens that renting out is one of the things regulated because of demonstrated negative externalities.

> It's like a subtler version of guilty-until-proven-innocent.

That principle only applies to criminal law.

> It's like a subtler version of guilty-until-proven-innocent.

> That principle only applies to criminal law.

Of course you're right, literally. But only literally. Which part of the word "like" do you not understand?

Is it perfectly fine to treat people with a G-U-P-I attitude as long as you don't do it in the context of criminal law? What about Google canceling your Adsense account for reasons known only to them and refusing to talk with you at all? What about PayPal freezing random charities' accounts with no recourse other than shaming them on reddit? If that's okay, may I accuse you of killing my cat, just because you can't show me any proof that you didn't?

Outside of criminal law, mostly your question would be answered by the contracts you signed or otherwise agreed to. Read them and find out.

Generally I would argue that businesses that provide contracts to the wide world would have termination clauses : both parties can end the contract, with no warning, with no explanation necessary. Since you agreed to this, why would you be opposed to it ? Go to a competitor.

Killing animals you don't own is entirely different (it is criminal) and I don't understand why you're comparing the two, or why you feel both should carry similar laws.

Zoning laws.

Rapid turnover of occupants has a tangibly negative affect on the quality of life of the neighbours. In this case, the landlord is profiting from making other people's lives worse.

That might be true for a neighborhood where none of the residents stay for long, but we're not talking about that here. It's like the inn in any small town in the old days. A bit of turnover doesn't hurt the neighborhood, it adds vibrancy and variation.

If anything, I think the typical suburban development where everyone is tied down with 40-year mortgages but nobody is actually home during the week is even more detrimental to the "quality of life of the neighborhood" than a bustling, noisier, more diverse place would be.

There's been a few HNers that have shared bad stories of what happens when an AirBnB landlord is letting an apartment nearby. You get short-term stayers who are in town to party and you don't get much sleep when those kind of people are around. 'Bustling, noisier' is alright when you're talking market day, but not so good when it's 2am.

And if you talk to people who live next to inns, they don't usually rate it as a net positive, particularly if the establishment serves alcohol. Intoxicated people make all sorts of messes that they don't clean up.

People tend to attract the attention of police when they make a lot of noise at 2am in a residential neighborhood, even when they're making noise on their own property. I don't see how it would be any different for AirBnB customers.

If the property is not suitable for partying at night, there should be a clause in the rental agreement (and corresponding details on the AirBnB listing page) that clearly says so. Someone like me who prefers a quiet night might even want to filter listings by that condition.

Well let's take your example and run with it.

If you own a house in a nice quiet street, and someone buys the place next door and wants to turn it into an inn, you'd expect to be consulted about that, right? You'd presumably expect that if everyone else in the street also objects, then planning consent for that business should be denied. If your inn analogy holds, then AirBnB provides no such opportunity for consultation.

The problem of high ratios of short-term occupants destroying communities is well known. The canonical example in the UK is student lets - landlords buy up properties close to universities and let them to students, over time the long term residents are forced out, leading to more and more student housing. These areas attract crime and other social problems because the community is vacant. This is why many councils in the UK restrict the number of HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupancy) in a given street or area, presumably this happens other places too.

There are good reasons for regulating something like AirBnB or Uber, and it will happen, it just takes lawmakers a little while to catch up.

So it all seems to depend on the ratio of long-term residents to short-term residents. In college towns, the balance shifts dangerously close to the short-term side. But do we have reason to think that AirBnB poses the same danger? Has there ever been a residential neighborhood where AirBnB clients comprise any more than a small fraction of the total population? Yes, some people are renting out entire apartment buildings, but that neighborhood probably has a hundred other apartment buildings, too, with several thousand residents in them.

A neighborhood is whatever its members make of it. If people don't like to have an inn next door, they have every right to speak up against it, organize if possible, and make life hell for the innkeeper so that he moves someplace else. But I'm not sure whether we need the heavy hand of the law to get involved in this at all. In your college town example, what are you going to do? Force students to live at least 5 miles away from campus? Nope, gotta make do with the people you've got, even if it means constructing a new funky subculture just for the student-heavy neighborhood.

I do agree that we need some sort of regulation. But I think those pages of law will be better spent on requirements of safety, taxation, etc. Even a proper enforcement of the fire code will probably wipe out a large percentage of the AirBnB listings.

Well let us be honest, if your renting out that often your not a private homeowner, you are the landlord. Which type of landlord you are depends on your rental frequency and as such which laws apply. I don't know the threshold, that is up to local regulation. So if you rent once a month you fall under typical renter regulations, if your weekly or daily rentals then your a hotel/motel?

In the end this boils down to a rights issue. We have lost our rights. The feds and the courts have adopted this twisted version of rights where they separate us from our property where convenient. When they cannot charge us they charge our property (see nsa/civil forfeiture) with a crime and seize it otherwise they charge the person or worse the customer. Its all about skirting the intent of the Constitution. Property tax laws insure no one truly owns the land besides the government, we effectively are all just renters.

So it comes down to, who has ultimate authority of a piece of land or improvements on it. Currently that has become government.

In NYC, it is primarily a safety/quality of live issue, and a housing issue.

1. The problem with what you are saying about weeding out unsafe listings is that pretty much any listing in a non-doorman building where there isn't someone in the apartment to oversee the guests is going to be unsafe and reduce the quality of life for the other residents, and those types of listings account for most of the illegal rentals. Essentially, you have a parade of people with keys to the building who don't live there, who are on vacation and don't really care how they effect the people around them.

2. It is taking a critical source of semi-affordable housing off the market: apartments in non-doorman, low-rise buildings. Renters can't compete with Airbnb on price, so more and more are getting snatched up to be run as hotels, increasing competition and driving prices up for everyone else.

I think the solution is almost exactly what the NY AG is pursuing: attempting to aggressively go after people renting apartments as illegal hotels so that it is no longer desirable to do operate them. Continue to allow people to "share" their homes by renting out a room or a couch, but restrict the "entire home" rentals to people who own their property and can legally do it.

I'm guessing you don't own a home or condo because your arguments all violate common sense. First, do you understand why owners don't like renters? Do you understand why short-term renters are worse than long term renters? Do you understand why owner-present is more desirable than owner-unpresent? Do you understand why a residential owner/renter would prefer not to have commercial activity next door? Do you understand why zoning exists? Do you understand why citizens are granted certain abilities to conduct business-like activities before triggering various business rules?

You're fighting a pretty losing argument here.

You're right, I don't own any real estate, and I do not plan to do so at any time in the foreseeable future. I don't like being tied down to any arbitrary segment of the Earth's crust, and I'll gladly pay more for the freedom to move somewhere more exciting at a few weeks' notice. (Yeah, so that's part of my motivation for defending AirBnB.)

The answer to the first four of your rhetorical questions all seem to involve some version of "I don't want my property to lose value". Since I have little sympathy for that kind of sentiment, it seems selfish to me for you to force (i.e. legally require) someone else to do this or that with his property just because it might negatively affect the value of your property. As long as your neighbor doesn't produce loud noises or obnoxious smells that cross into your property, you have no right to interfere with his use of his property. Would you also seek to ban African-American tenants from your neighborhood? Because, you know, the racial makeup of the neighborhood does have an impact on property values.

Note that I'm not saying everyone should bear with a hostel next door. If you want to live in an all-residential neighborhood, you are absolutely free to go and live in a place where everyone voluntarily agress to HOA rules against business-like activity. All I'm saying is that this should be voluntary, not a legal requirement, and there are already plenty of places in the U.S. where such voluntary agreements exist. If Manhattan doesn't happen to be one of those places, well, too bad.

As for the other two two questions, yes, I do understand the rationale for such policies, but I think that they have been corrupted to serve a narrow range of entrenched interests, and that they are badly in need of more flexible rethinking.

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