Airbnb bookings dry up in New York as new short-stay rules are introduced
Under the new restrictions, short-term renters will need to register with the city and must be present in the home for the duration of the rental
Home-sharing company Airbnb said it had to stop accepting some reservations in New York City after new regulations on short-term rentals went into effect.
The new rules are intended to effectively end a free-for-all in which landlords and residents have been renting out their apartments by the week or the night to tourists or others in the city for short stays. Advocates say the practice has driven a rise in demand for housing in already scarce neighbourhoods in the city.
Under the new system, rentals shorter than 30 days are only allowed if hosts register with the city. Hosts must also commit to being physically present in the home for the duration of the rental, sharing living quarters with their guest. More than two guests at a time are not allowed, either, meaning families are effectively barred.
They are trying to address housing shortages. The hotels might benefit, but so does everyone else because it effectively bars commercial operation of AirBnB. No landlords with 50 units etc.
Really to drop housing prices you have to address the secondary mortgage market. More supply is a band aid.
This will not actually help with the housing shortage. It will even result in further evictions as some people lose the potential income of renting out excess space to get over the hump.
That is still allowed though. The host can rent out a spare room with up to 2 guests at a time. The host just has to live there.
So they register? There isn't anything to indicate that hosts who plan to rent out a spare room and follow the rules won't be approved.
When you register, you must comply with hotel-level standards.
I went and looked up the regulations.
https://rules.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/FINAL-RULES-GOVERNING-REGISTRATION-AND-REQUIREMENTS-FOR-SHORT-TERM-RENTALS-1.pdf
Host requirements start on the bottom of page 16. The requirements boil down to posting a fire exit diagram of the unit, keeping records, and not violating building or fire codes. Nothing in there that really seems that onerous, and is stuff that obviously protects the guests.
This requires personal investment from people over something they nominally may not have the means or ability to change or influence.
Fire doesn't care about limp excuses.
So guests should just burn then? Like we have regulations because people died before said regulations.
I'm sorry was there a rush of ABNB fires I haven't heard about or is this a total non-issue
Yea you're not really arguing in good faith here. You know fires happen and the lack of basic alerting systems is a concern. These regulations aren't costing folks 10 grand to do. There is a cost of doing business and New York has stated this is that cost. Take it up with your state assembly if you don't like it.
It is quite firmly my stance that none of the people barking up this "fire bad" tree are engaging in good faith at all, since none of these AirBnBs demonstrate undue risk worthy of their own fire code ordinances
Asking a person to install their own fire door to rent a room out is absurd.
Oh look, here's a list of fires that happened in buildings with short-term rentals, where egress, fire alarms, and sprinkler systems saved actual lives...
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/public-safety/2023/03/16/fdny-investigates-fire-at-ues-luxury-hotel
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/manhattan-fire-at-central-park-south-hotel-sparks-major-fdny-response-what-to-know/4120852/
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/fire-prompts-evacuation-of-park-lane-hotel-along-central-park-south/
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/midtown-hotel-evacuated-amtrak-fire/
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/rooftop-fire-erupts-at-exclusive-casa-cipriani-hotel-in-nyc/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/nyregion/fire-hotel-manhattan.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fire-injures-seven-manhattan-highrise-b1962437.html
https://www.fireengineering.com/firefighting/16-alarm-fire-brooklyn-new-york/#gref
Who'da thunk it?!?! Do you enjoy playing dumb?
These are all hotel fires lol.
Short term rental fires, yes. Which proves that....short term rentals do occasionally go up in flames with renters inside.
You don't win any awards with those powers of observation there, do ya champ?
Then I guess they shouldn't be opening living spaces to other people for commercial purposes. Almost like doing that implies you have a responsibility to your guests
The horror.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-05/airbnb-s-new-nyc-regulations-what-renters-and-hosts-need-to-know
This effectively blocks struggling renters from using ABNB to bridge their payment gaps.
Yes, I think people being evicted over this policy would agree with the statement "the horror"
It's weird to watch you balance "evictions are evil" with "I hate what I'm told to hate" and end up choosing your hate first.
Those struggling renters might not be struggling so much if other people renting out their apartments on AirBnB weren't pushing up their rent by an extra 20%.
Housing markets have problems. AirBnB is not a responsible solution to those problems.
https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-city-increase-so-do-rent-prices
As mentioned previously, then they shouldn't be housing others. You spend a small sum of money to make money, when I worked for the city of new York, all us engineers knew the saying, "regulations are written in blood" because NYC was one of the first cities to experiment with new housing methods and such. We were thus the first to witness the horrors of lack of regulation.
I wasn't alive for the triangle waistcoat factory disaster. Will I learn from it? Yes. Will I force others to learn from it and protect innocent people around them? Also yes. Fire does not care about your class or situation, they happen and the steps to being protected are necessary.
If a person has extra rooms and can barely afford rent, they are occupying a unit that doesn't fit their needs. They would be better served by downsizing to a smaller, more affordable place instead of heaping their financial problems onto the rest of society. Alternatively they could sublet the room(s) which would better serve their community instead of catering to tourists.
I'll be sure to remind everyone who gets evicted about this.
Good?
Oh my god, you have to register with the city, like every other landlord? Crazy.
Yes and this requires additional restrictions on the property that many people flat-out cannot afford.
Like what, exactly? If you can't afford a fire alarm or sprinkler system, you really shouldn't be running a rental business. Hell, if you can't afford a fire alarm, you have much bigger problems than whether or not you can rent a room to a stranger.
You aren't running a rental business in these cases, but supplementing your income by allowing someone into your home a few times per year.
.....which makes you a business. You're making income from rentals. A landlord who has 500 units but can't seem to fill them but once or twice per year for a weekend doesn't suddenly stop being a landlord. And if they told me "I'm just supplementing my income" in order to get around installing fire alarms, I'd laugh in their face.
If you're providing a commercial service to strangers, you should be able to ensure their safety, full stop. If you can't afford to do that, you can't afford to provide the commercial service.
I find it so weird that your take is "only the wealthy deserve a home, period." Like that's such a hellish thing to say.
What a cockamamie take! We're not kicking these people out of their homes by forcing them to follow simple rules to ensure they don't burn families of random strangers in a raging inferno. They're still free to....y'know....have and live in their home.
... that they can't afford.
By your exact same logic, if someone is making and selling meth out of their home in order to make supplemental income and bridge payment gaps, then by telling them to stop we’re effectively telling them “only the wealthy deserve a home, period.”
Is "people can't afford to live" your "get out of jail free" card?
I find this viewpoint fascinating. Like arguing that trying to put out a burning building will hurt poor people trying to keep warm.
The housing market as a whole is the problem, one which AirBnB is exacerbating. That it locally enriches those renters able to find people willing to rent out their homes -- which I'm guessing is disproportionately going to be people without elderly family members & kids -- doesn't mean it isn't detrimental to the housing market as a whole, particularly at the lower end, and to everyone who rents.
If they can't afford to sit on multiple empty houses due to increased AirBnB regulations, then they can always sell some of those assets back into the market. In fact, that's the point of the regulation :P
The idea of some poor landlord barely scraping things together because their 50 rental properties (and thus millions of dollars worth of assets) are less profitable is preposterous
The idea is that a non-negligible amount of renters pad their rental income with AirBnB and are not actually landlords.
Are you, by any chance, padding your income by subletting your rental home on AirBnB?
Judging by how hard they are attacking this thread (seriously like half the comments are them), I am going to say yes. I don't believe them denying it.
No. I own my own home and my mortgage costs less than average rent here, while my home has more than doubled in value, and I am sickened by that.
Because of systems like Airbnb adding to the scarcity. Do you not see that?
If you can afford to run a business you can afford to run a business properly.
Not if onerous regulations designed to solve problems that don't exist are placed in your way by populist idiot laws.
Theoretically, any business could be legislated out of existence maliciously.
How is following basic fire code onerous?
From what I can tell this is to help make sure they follow the new rules
If those hypothetical people lose their investment houses then other people can buy them.
To live in.
People who aren't living in their home will lose the home to eviction? Listen to my violin.