This Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 165 points – This Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
wired.com

This Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse::A law meant to crack down on short-term rentals in New York City took effect Tuesday. Thousands have dropped off the map, but there are still hosts offering bookings that may break the law.

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I love seeing more places banning or restricting air bnb. Fuck that company and its role in the housing crisis.

Fuck most of the ‘gig’ economy in general. It’s just a way for venture capitalists to skirt labour laws while peddling shitty stock to retail rubes.

It's also literally always trying to monopolise the platform for a market and then essentially extract rent from that platform, which is stupid, Uber and Airbnb (....) provide an app and maybe a little customer support but joink N% percent of each transaction.

The gist to it:

70% drop in short-term Airbnbs after the law's enforcement.

Approximately 15,000 listings disappeared between August 4 and September 5.

Long-term listings (30 days or more) increased by about 11,000.

Long-term listings are exempt from the new registration law.

15k units in a city the size of NY seems like peanuts to me. I would be shocked if that creates any noticeable downward pressure on housing prices in the city. Might increase the cost to travel to NYC and depress tourism a bit, but I doubt even that will be a huge effect.

We'll see how many of those long term listings keep around vs selling out from not being profitable.

Wired has gotten pretty bad. Can't even read what they're saying because of the paywall, so I'll have to respond to the title and say AirBNB shouldn't exist in the first place, so who gives a shit if the top of their pyramid can't buy a third yacht this year. Fuck all of them.

Airbnb was great when it was simply a formalization of the short-term room rentals you find on craigslist.

When investors got involved and started having Airbnb specific properties, it all went to shit.

I would say now that I'm in my thirties that my favorite part has been watching this mad scramble over the past decade of absolutely everything new and innovative becoming these out of control behemoths because investors somewhere decided that an app that rates farts has a market cap of $10 billion.

Now we've come into an era where fart app employs 20k people and they somehow need to make all of the money back that they burned building a global fartforce

I loved it when it started. I rented a room from an old lady in Tokyo who didn't speak one word of english but she loved that I brought her beer, and a bunch of Matrix looking EDM loving germans in Berlin.

Now it is just a shit and fucking expensive "hotelroom" where you have to pay and outrageous a clean fee up if you fart in the bedsheets

The article is fine and sticks to the facts of the law and how it’s being rolled out. The title is just clickbait. But I agree that it’s an absurdity to describe this as an apocalypse while shrugging off the staggering human suffering caused by the housing crisis in New York and many other cities.

Also, pro-tip: if you click the cross-post button, Lemmy auto-generates several mirror links to get around the paywall.

I hope to see more properties getting listed and hopefully dropping the price per Sq ft in NYC