Airbnb revolutionised people travel and live — personally, I've been living in airbnbs full-time for the last two years and loving it. I only had a bad experience once, and got reimbursed, with $400 bonus on top, 20 minutes after opening a support ticket.
Honestly, I don't understand audacity of people who are trying to dictate to real estate owners what they can and can't do with their property, or people who think that a city or neighbourhood is "theirs" just because they happen to live there for a long time — without actually owning anything. While Airbnb violated local laws, I haven't seem them violating laws that I would ever consider moral or justified.
If you think about Airbnb like the "Ticketmaster" of real estate, all the hate makes sense. There's all sorts of things wrong with real estate, landlords, etc but for the most part there's no single thing to blame. Airbnb is an easy target, both for politicians and anyone upset about the status quo but unsure who to be angry at.
I mention Ticketmaster because I think its actually intentional that they exist as the "bogey man" of live events. They take all the hate, all the flak, related to how ridiculously expensive it is to see a concert and thus shield all the other people and companies profiting off that status quo.
the only reason they get so staunchly defended by the tech establishment is because of how much money they've made for people like paulg and the early investors.
This comment feels like it barely makes sense, both of these are hypercapital companies who distort local markets big time. My local music scene is butting right up against LiveNation/ClearChannel and it definitely affects musicians and promoters in my city to the point that these venues will shamelessly rip off events that have their own following. Needless to say there are not enough people to go to both and so the local promoter who is often running at a very thin margin ends up having to stop.
Of course, I digress, but this capitalist law of the jungle model applies in many places.
> people who think that a city or neighbourhood is "theirs" just because they happen to live there for a long time — without actually owning anything.
Are you saying that only owners can decide what happens on a given neighbourhood? This is a really narrow way to define a community: suddenly people who do not own become second-class citizens.
> While Airbnb violated local laws, I haven't seem them violating laws that I would ever consider moral or justified.
That is not how local laws work. They are contextual, not absolute. And they are definitively not written while thinking "would golergka think this is _cool_?".
That’s an absurd view if we are talking about real estate that probably has never been true (in complex societies but maybe also beyond) and probably cannot ever be true if we are talking about non-dystopian societies.
I would say that your view is extreme or at least hyperbole.
A lot of people believe they should be able to do things with their property so long as it doesn't impose on others.
Whether I live in my house or a guest who is paying me shouldn't be a legal concern. All this talk about party houses or too much parking, or other externalities pushed on neighbors are misleading. There are laws or could be for all of these.
Instead we have cities which have de facto taken ownership of other's property. Sure, reasonable things will be mentioned like fire codes or proper sewage. But then there are things like not being able to paint your house a certain color. Or have tenants.
The idea that merely owning property gives you total unilateral power over what can be done with it is I guess common but it's certainly not the only conception of private property that exists.
Land is what it is because of where it is. Models exist along a spectrum of where they distribute powers over land, but placing them all with the owner with no input from the surrounding community or state is fringe, even freak.
> people who think that a city or neighbourhood is "theirs" just because they happen to live there for a long time — without actually owning anything.
God forbid poor people feel a sense of place, community, and pride in their hometown.
> God forbid poor people feel a sense of place, community, and pride in their hometown.
I agree with a majority of your comment, but I don't think this is what parent meant here. I have a similar gripe with a lot of the "this is our neighborhood" arguments I hear online and elsewhere as parent. People seem to simultaneously claim membership/ownership in a community as well as estrangement.
I think everyone should feel a sense of pride/community where they live. However, if they don't feel that, it's also the community's fault, not Airbnb's. Providing an opportunity to people is not what changes a community for the worse, it's how the community chooses to use it.
The thing is that few bad actors, who maybe don't even live in a given community, can ruin it for the community.
What are the options for the community to prevent this? Or does community have no rights to preserve itself, given someone with deep enough pockets come?
Yeah, there's nuance there and I definitely agree it's not airbnb's fault or responsibility. But the comment was assigning the right to have input on the character & trajectory of a place solely with property ownership, which is foul.
You can't even imagine buying a house in a neighborhood in your city and then having some dentist from Ohio buying the house next to yours and operating it as a 24/7 party house and you have the audacity to question the morality or justification of complainants? Forgive me if I write you off completely as a serious person.
If I would be buying a house, I would be looking for a HOA which would have an explicit, contractual obligation of keeping the noise level low. So when this dentist would do this, I would be delighted to get compensation from him.
Government's laws and regulations are not contracts. People don't enter them voluntarily and they are not known ahead of time — it's simply the will of the voting majority, or worse, imposed on everybody with violence.
I can promise, anecdotally, that is not followed. You know where the AirBnB houses are in my Mom's neighborhood in La Costa/Carlsbad area because they will always have loud people/parties. Neighbors are polite enough to give a heads up if they're going to be loud generally.
That would be easier to do if all of the AirBnB hotel-alikes had signage indicating they were AirBnB. After all, I'm not going to report all parties I find objectionable to all of the house rental companies.
The issue is that it becomes a nuisance, a 24/7 party apartment is exactly that in a building: a nuisance.
Also, freedom to do whatever you want in your property is not how most of the world operates, if you share a building with others in most countries you have to abide to certain rules. These rules are more commonly disrespected by short-term guests who don't have to care about long-term relationships with neighbours.
If it's not a nuisance, then no one would complain, but it eventually becomes a nuisance. As an anecdote: a month ago I stayed a few days (5-7) at a friend's place I was visiting who lives in Lisbon, just on his floor there are 4 AirBnBs (owned by the same person). Not only it was a nuisance with noise for most of the days I was there it was also a nuisance to have drunk British girls banging on your door at 02.00 in the night when they don't remember the fucking apartment they are supposedly going to. My friend mentioned it's not uncommon for that to happen, or to have a gag of people show up to a party in one of the apartments. Other people living in the building have complained to AirBnB, to the police, to the housing association, nothing really happens.
This is just one building, in one city suffering the bad sides of tourism, I can't imagine how many of these instances repeat throughout AirBnB-listed properties in similar places...
> These rules are more commonly disrespected by short-term guests
So enforce them, it's one five minute zero-interaction phone call to have a cop deal with a noise complaint. I can, and do, throw loud parties at my apartment, stumble through my hallways drunk, and host rowdy out of town friends and no one dares question my ability to live there.
Trying to enforce social norms by not allowing "certain kinds of people" to sleep there is grade-a bullshit. Trying to get outcome A by making a rule about B is unfair to everyone who is B but not A and A but not B. This kind of reasoning is why it's so hard to get multi-family housing approved. A nice suburb in my city forced the development of new desperately needed apartment complexes to be on the the border because "less desirable" people live in apartments.
> So enforce them, it's one five minute zero-interaction phone call to have a cop deal with a noise complaint. I can, and do, throw loud parties at my apartment, stumble through my hallways drunk, and host rowdy out of town friends and no one dares question my ability to live there.
"Just enforce them" is a non-solution, I mentioned that my anecdote included calling cops and bringing it up with AirBnB and housing association, the apartments are still listed, as they've been for 3 years. You can't just say "enforce them" and expect that magically it will happen, even less in a city where tourism has become a major economical backbone. The world is not that simple, these negative externalities can't be shoved under a rug when they start affecting a whole city's living population like is the case in Lisbon...
> Trying to enforce social norms by not allowing "certain kinds of people" to sleep there is grade-a bullshit. Trying to get outcome A by making a rule about B is unfair to everyone who is B but not A and A but not B. This kind of reasoning is why it's so hard to get multi-family housing approved. A nice suburb in my city forced the development of new desperately needed apartment complexes to be on the the border because "less desirable" people live in apartments.
Please, don't soapbox, the issue with AirBnBs in overcrowded touristic places is very, very different than whatever bullshit zoning laws happen in the USA, don't conflate those issues as they are not the same.
In my experience, Lisbon really is the worst case scenario of gentrification and tourism gone absolutely wrong. A fair amount of Portuguese are profiting from it, but I can imagine how much of a burden it is for the ones who don't.
Do you think I used the terminology "24/7 party house" to cover properties that are not a nuisance. You're on the list of unserious people as well now.
Usually airbnb is working around zoning laws. The essence of airbnb is to rent out regular apartments in regular apartment buildings. Which are not designed to be hotel-like short term rentals.
There is no functional society that does not impose massive limitations on property owners for a simple reason: What you do with your property significantly impact the ability of others to enjoy their property.
Maximising the utility and liberty for all requires limitations.
One of my friends have spent a couple of months severely depressed because his girlfriend left him. While I sympathise with him and spent a lot of time supporting him in this hard time, neither him nor me doubted her right to break up with him.
Why would our sympathy for poor people would affect our view of what real estate owners can do with their property?
> I don't understand audacity of people who are trying to dictate to real estate owners what they can and can't do with their property
I don't understand this argument. If you live in the middle of a desert or if you own an entire building in the suburbs, sure, do what you want, that's what it's allowed in those places.
But if you own a flat in the middle of a very densely populated city, with rules, where even buying a home is regulated and taxed because society wants that, then this argument doesn't hold. You literally can't do what you want with your property. In Europe at least we have regional building regulations, town taxes to pay for garbage we produce, natural disasters dictating how things are built, and we even have specific rules for each building where your flat is located in. For example in my flat I can't have BBQs on the balcony where other people might do their laundry, or I can't smoke in the elevator, etc, etc... basic rules and compromises for basic societal well-being. It's very far from being able to do whatever we want.
Honestly, I don't understand audacity of people who are trying to dictate to real estate owners what they can and can't do with their property, or people who think that a city or neighbourhood is "theirs" just because they happen to live there for a long time — without actually owning anything. While Airbnb violated local laws, I haven't seem them violating laws that I would ever consider moral or justified.