Because it's almost impossible to purchase a house if you live and work in a large city now.

Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.

It seems like Airbnb is an easy scapegoat to use for the actual problem of not enough houses existing/being built. Another scapegoat is ‘foreign investors’ but I think this also isn’t true. In the US I think the people willing to make cash offers for houses in expensive cities are often the rich people who live there. There are also companies that will advance you the cash so that you can make a cash offer before going through the whole mortgage process, which seems a bit silly but if these companies exist then some people making cash offers must also be regularish wealthy home buyers who will use regular mortgages.

It's a symptom of viewing homes as investment properties. Building more just dilutes the value of their investments. Heavily tax or ban owning mulitple homes and watch as cities suddenly become affordable again.

Do you think this is an primarily caused by Airbnb?

I live in a city that is a major tourist destination worldwide. Tourism has always been a blessing and a curse; shops always suffered a pressure to become tourist oriented; some big buildings were converted to hotels.

With AirBnB the problem has expanded massively. I cannot find a 3-room office that is not miles away from the city center because everything that size is an AirBnB. An employee I just hired that moved here from a different city has been forced to live for months in an AirBnB because there are no long term rentals in the city (ah!).

Since every wall-confined space can be an AirBnB, every wall-confined space becomes one. The lack of regulation makes a real difference, compared to shop and hotels.

Yep, i live in a country with massive housing issues in our cities (well... like most other countries), and banning airbnb is mentioned a couple of times a week now in mainstream media.

And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from the seaside, almost nothing new is being built ("preserving the heritage" ... after being a communust country for 50 years, and most of the "heritage" was built in the 1970s in 80s), and anything already built being sold is massively overpriced (literally not worth it unless you're lending it out via airbnb).

I'm usually against banning stuff, but if airbnb was banned, it would be a good thing. Tourist belong in hotels, hostels, etc. and apartment buildings are for people who actually live there. And lets not forget the additional problems airbnb brings to an otherwise residential apartment building (parties (=noise), drunk tourists, destroyed shared property, etc.).

I think banning airbnb outright is not a good idea. They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there, because otherwise it's not worth it. Might be a pain to control across multiple renting platforms, but it's possible and if you catch a couple of persons and condemn them to high fines, this will make the rounds and other short term renters will stop.

> They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there…

This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.

Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant. Just rent through Airbnb and then talk to the guy about a normal lease.

If you want, text me where you are, I’ll put up $10k for a bet and then if I can find you a 3 room office, you give me $10k. If I can’t, I’ll give you $10k. Gotta be anglophone, though and none of this long-term rent controlled shit because no one wants to get locked into that. My French is atrocious and my German worse and I can’t speak anything else.

EDIT: Fine, fuck it, give me a year to learn the Spanish and up the bet to $100k and I’ll do it. I find very often that things that are impossible for others are easy for me. But list your conditions up front here. I think I could manage anyhow.

You never heard of it, but there are plenty in Spain. I don't live in a tourist city but I go ofter to Madrid and Barcelona and it's a serious problem there.

It's not the primary source of the housing problem, but it definitey contributes to it.

>Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant.

or unless you can make significantly more money as a short term rental. Also if you can theoretically hide your earnings (although I guess you can't most places anymore)

also, I believe most EU countries have some form of renter protection laws.

For illustration, where I am you can make up 1 month of long term rent in about 5 nights of Airbnb. The rest of the month is just pure profit.

Well, at that point, it's that old HN adage: there's no shortage; you just refuse to pay enough. There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.

well that adage is normally applied to employees under the naive assumption that you can pass the costs onto your customer (assumption generally made because you are looking for an employee because you have projects to finish with customers that pay for those projects), but when finding a place to live if you are middle class and not able to afford to live in the area it does not follow that a reasonable solution would be that you pay money that you do not possess and what, pass it on to your boss in the morning by saying 'guess what, you gotta give me a raise now!'

>There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.

oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.

Here in a coastal south spain city, the rule is pretty much this:

weekly short term rental price in summer = monthly rental price for long term resident.

So if you rent for 12 weeks between late may and end of september you already make as much money than having a rental resident, and can still rent more expensively than a short term resident. For example owners typically rent a lot to tourists during the hottest months and in autumn/winter/fall a lot of digital nomad are filling the gap. They also usually have done the math and can swallow the higher rent than a local would.

Having said that, I don't want to be an owner here. Administration is horrible but basically everyone you will meet are either lazy or want to defraud you in some way and they have absolutely no sense of quality work. A friend of mine is renovating a small house all by himself because he got fed up by the locals. Maybe the end result won't be , but here the pros won't give you professionnal quality job anyway so at least he won't feel screwed.

This isn’t a Vegas poker table. Making prop bets for more money than a lot of people here can make in a year is rather uncouth.

I'm pretty sure the claims are overstated so I'd want some skin in the game. I'd have to go learn conversational Spanish / able to read local cultural cues / travel there so that's going to cost me time.

Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.

Short term rentals can have significant advantages over long term - for example, it's painless to "evict" a short term renter in almost every jurisdiction, but once it passes 30 or 90 days in some areas it becomes a multi-month process.

In cities like NY, you can easily make more in a week of renting out your apartment via AirBnb than you would in a month via a traditional lease.

I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.

Oh, boy... go take a look at Greece more touristy spots. It's more profitable to keep the house closed for 8 months in the year and only rent in the season. It's much harder to avoid reporting income from normal lease, while with AirBNB you can just "forget" to report it, or even easier, just offer a small discount if they pay cash.

No, property management companies already did this to a limited extent - but airbnb has made it easy enough that it has reached a critical mass level resulting in home prices spiraling out of control to the point that homes are now relisted 6 months later at even 100% markup or greater.

The problem here in Atlanta is so bad that the core city has now banned airbnb without an explicit permit. We are hoping that gets adopted across the metro area.

In tourist heavy cities like Barcelona and Lisbon, yes. I've seen it first hand.

It will be interesting to see what happens in Amsterdam over the next few years since they clamped down hard on AirBnB.

Hosts now have to be officially registered with the city. AirBnB lost something like 90% of their hosts overnight!

Many major cities are clamping down hard. Mayors and politicians are under much more pressure from locals to stop their cities turning into, well, Amsterdam. Tourism is fine, but it has increasingly come at the cost of locals.

> Tourism is fine

Well... a moderate amount of tourism is fine, even beneficial; but excessive tourism in any given location becomes a blight. Airbnb has contributed to that, by facilitating short-term profits for "hosts" and the company and ignoring the negative impact.

Tourism that overwhelms the location turns it into a tourist trap; whatever it had before becomes a veneer over the main industry, which will be tourism.

In some places this is incredibly visible (think Las Vegas Strip vs Las Vegas) but you can also see it in many famous tourist destinations.

Of course, large cities like Tokyo are quite resistant to tourism, just because of how big they are - certain areas and attractions may be tourist heavy but the city is still Tokyo.

It's not the only cause but a significant one.

That's just if you live in a city with bad zoning policies or in cultures that hate high rises.

Not the city, but the locals who are not in tech.

The whole city suffers in the long run, as business get torn up to make a quick buck with rents, and the city becomes an empty fun park for tourists.

The problem obviously exists beyond AirBnB, but AirBnB massively escalated the problem.

Indeed, the entire city. In e.g. Amsterdam (a relatively tiny area, high tourism density) or Venice, in areas things have been pushed over. It's a spiral. E.g. something simple as "pharmacies" or "supermarkets". They leave/close because of less demand. Which decreases liveability, causing more locals to move out, causing more such businesses to close etc. These effects come next to "increasing house prices".

It really is so problematic that cities like Berlin, Amsterdam (and I believe Venice) and many more crack down on AirBnBs. Hard. You are allowed to rent out the apartment where you live, but for limited time and with high fines or even extradiction on renting out beyond the limits (e.g. 90 days per year). You are certainly no longer allowed to have AirBnBs for the sole purpose of renting out to AirBnb.

Edit: and in e.g. Berlin, AirBnB does not hand over the data of their users/renters (which Is good, I presume). So they have people scanning the renting-websites, visting homes and even posting outside to find evidence something is rented out beyond the allowed duration.

Governments tell people what their property can be used for all the time.

Even laissez faire countries like America use things like 'zoning' and 'setbacks' to control what you're allowed to do on your own property.

Ironically, the zoning in US is far, far more restrictive than in most of Europe.

So bad, that you often cannot even have a neighborhood café, corner pub, or local shop in modern suburbs. So bad, that you need to take the car to do shopping. For someone from western Europe, this is mind blowing insane: you need to take the car to buy your milk!

Well, sure, but you bought property in those areas depending on if you wanted to run a business or use it as a residence. Maybe there should be a separate residence-as-business zone used for Airbnbs.

Banning short-term rental properties feels like a quick bandaid to gain political points, not a solution to a market with a large demand.

> Banning short-term rental properties feels like a quick bandaid to gain political points, not a solution to a market with a large demand.

Seems more that you want government to facilitate running a business where it's not in the interest of that government, nor in the interest of the locals. Airbnb's aren't beneficial, plus they aren't checked as properly as a hotel.

Usually it isn't banned, what they're after is that it is limited (days/year), plus the AirBnB income is properly taxed.

That's a great requirement imo. For short term stay, we already have hotels, hostels and regular BnBs. Apartments and houses should be reserved for long term stay and regulated accordingly.

The original idea of AirBnB was to easily rent your couch or guest room for a few nights and I think regulations should be made to keep it this way.

> Just because Airbnb exploded this practice in popularity doesn’t give governments the right to say what purpose owners can use their property for.

That’s true.

The power of government to govern does not originate with AirBnB, but predates it considerably.

The particular use of the power may be responsive to situations created by AirBnB, though.

AirBnB is causing issues and the government is adressing it. I bet that many residents are asking for an outright ban of it. If I were in Madrid or Barcelona, I bet I'd do.

> doesn't give governments the right to say what purpose owners can use their property for.

of course the government is gonna govern.

quoting you here

"governments told what purpose owners can use their property for, for ever"

they are addressing those issues in limiting short rent rentals. long term rentals are allowed and regulated.

The main thing that is being handled is how to correctly handle/account for it - a long term rental and a house are basically identical from the purposes of what the government provides, both may have families with children going to school, need stores, etc.

But short-term rentals are basically identical with hotels which are commercial properties and have substantially different requirements - the people staying there will not frequent supermarkets, etc as much as they will restaurants, etc. They will not be sending their children to the local school, and so on.

Mixed use property can be (and should be!) encouraged, but it does have externalities that have to be handled and accounted for.

That doesn't solve the problem, you get a Dutch disease.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

That's fine if you want to punish people who manages to get out of rent slavery.