Big tech - move fast, break things, disrupt, and destroy
Like kudzu
or feral swine
Southerner here. FYI, kudzu is nowhere near as bad as this big tech shit. It doesn’t actually engulf entire forests; it just looks like it does because it covers the edges of them and that’s mostly the part that people see.
Mostly profit though.
Forgot the opportunity cost.
They didn’t accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
Don’t you? I can’t think of any instance of justice truly being served to billionaires, can you?
SBF recently and Madoff before him.
Those are fair points, but I can’t help but chuckle that they were brought to justice because they stole from millionaires and other billionaires to make their ill gotten gains. Probably woulda got away with it if they just stole from the poor and middle class.
Is that so for SBF? I genuinely have no idea.
Not quite as many as Madoff, but some notable folks and investors.
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn’t do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, “fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here.” A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It’s about as fucked as it can get. And when we’ve had a sympathetic council person, they’re immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It’s a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That’s no typo; twenty five percent of our valley’s residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.
Visiting my husband’s home town where this has happened and all his parent’s friends have moved into trailers because the houses where they raised their kids were bought for insane amounts but then they couldn’t afford a smaller house in the same town. Where we live now on the East Coast, we can no longer stay in our school district for less than half a million because doctors from larger urban areas keep buying the houses in our school district and we’re being forced 60+100 miles out from my hometown where we raised our young kids to even begin to afford housing.
My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.
We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.
I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.
Cops would rather beat up college students and the unhoused than go after landlords.
that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers
Ah, yes. We don’t have money because collecting taxes would be too expensive. Classic.
Not being corrupted is just too darn expensive.
I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.
Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.
Is it not tax evasion/fraud? In the US, either can bring criminal charges. For a smaller municipality, is there no assistance available from higher government?
No clue - most of that is either a department I’m not in and don’t know much about, or it’s way over my head. I’m just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That’s the biggest impediment.
I’m an activist writing a housing bill to get introduced to my state legislature. Part of it specifically addresses these platforms, but I don’t know what’s been tried against them yet. Any tips?
Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.
It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
I’ll go one step further, I’d pay taxes to the government that actually regulates shitty business practices. How is it easier to have a 12% increase in homelessness last year than it is to regulate fucking airbnb? Airbnb is not northrup grumman. It’s not allied steel. it can go the fuck away.
Oh I 100% agree - when I finally managed to finish my degree a few years ago, I did my capstone research on suburban/rural homelessness, and I’m now an even bigger proponent of housing-first policies. Supportive housing works better than piecemeal programs, and outcomes are better for sobriety and mental health treatment than they are for programs that require those things as a condition of getting housing.
Unfortunately, people fucking love to hate the homeless. Everyone wants to put conditions on every scrap you give them because “I worked for what I have, they should have to, too!” There’s not a lot of political support to be found for policies that are based on meeting people where they are. Saying we should use housing that’s already vacant to help people get off the streets would get you booed right out of the room a lot of the time.
The government just doesn’t work for the people anymore. It works for the donors that fund them.
…decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else.
-The American Dream™
They are a company with zero morals and the goal to maximize profits. That’s what capitalism is for and were it’s good at.
The government needs to create rules and laws to make sure that this profit maximizing doesn’t happen on the back of ordinary people, but since corporate america is allowed to control the government through money, this doesn’t happen.
Capitalism is a tool, can we please start to use it like that again?!
the problem is already in the word itself… capitalism
aka to capitalize on someone else’s problems\misfortunes
No. I can see this being unfairly interpreted.
Hotels were a nightmare, cabs were a nightmare. These companies indisputably changed the game in the favour of the consumer all around the world.
Where we are now having an issue is large swaths of housing taken over by companies and investors wanting a return. As long as housing and renting are attractive for investment over and about housing and transitory renting, it will attract lots of money.
Supply must be improved to improve the housing market. This should be a continuous government function at least at the low and middle income level not just a private endeavour.
Density and public transport is the answer - not killing something that absolutely changed the game and took the hotel and cab market back to their customers begging for a chance.
Agreed on cabs but hotels haven’t changed anything significantly and they’re looking much better than AirBnB at this point.
They ripped out the carpets. It made everything better.
What wasn’t a nightmare was bed and breakfasts. They also weren’t an excuse to keep property off the housing rental market at scale.
These companies aren’t saviours, they’re businesses who rode public tech optimism and common frustration at established industries in the same fields to stay ahead of regulation and have the public demand it. Surprise, they’re the same businesses.
Yes, bed and breakfasts rock, and I try to use them when I travel because the experience is way better.
Don’t have bed and breakfast money. They are regularly more expensive and have less choices than Airbnb
The ones I’ve been to are comparable to a hotel and include a good breakfast. So yeah, a bit more than an Airbnb, but not that far off from Airbnb + good breakfast restaurant.
Yeah, I think the main issue is supply. Airbnb works because of a mix of supply and costs. There just aren’t many nice places to stay in resort areas, and the few that exist are extremely expensive (e.g. fancy hotels). Likewise, hotels are often more expensive and less convenient if you have a large group (e.g. my family likes to vacation together, and there’s like 20 of us).
The problem seems to be long term residents feeling the pain of increased housing costs. If you legislate against that, those tourists will still need to go somewhere, which means more hotels or more strain on transportation from the outlying areas to the tourist area. If mass transit is effective, that’s not a big issue, but far too often that’s not the case, so you’ll just end up with tons of traffic.
My proposal is to not ban it, but instead limit it to residents, so in order to do short-term rentals, you need to be physically present a majority of the year. Otherwise, you need to apply as a regular rental, which can be limited to certain areas near transit hubs to keep traffic under control. Then improve transit into the area so tourists who don’t fit in the city can easily get there.
Sure, but AirBnB and Uber didn’t improve the hotel and taxi markets, they just joined them. They each took advantage of a tech debt and then lowered the barriers for entry to the market. In doing so, they made a shit ton of money by carving out market share from the fucked up systems you described.
Seriously? Not sure about airbnb since I use booking, but Uber was so much better than cabs it wasn’t even close. They didn’t even make that much money. They lost money last quarter
Also by doing and end run around regulations by pretending to be people just renting their house when they are away or giving rides to people going in the same directions. That is why they have names like ‘ride share’ instead of ‘contracted cabbies who drive their own cars’.
Accidentally?
Same when NASA accidentally landed on the moon
The only thing they’ve ever done on accident was make their logo look like a ballsack.
Lol
Can’t unseen it now, thanks.
“Accident” fkn lol
It also doesn’t help housing prices that the landlords are colluding to raise prices:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing
It isn’t just Airbnb’s fault, it’s landlords wanting to maximize their return, no matter the method (short-term rentals or price fixing collusion).
Then explain why this is a global phenomenon?
Because often it is a nightmare to evict a tenant that do not pay the rent.
I can speak for where I live where a lot of people gone to the short-rental way exactly because that way they have the certainty that when they want the house back, for every reason, they have it.
To me AirBnB is not the problem, it is the wrong solution to a real problem.
Whole home or dedicated AIRBNB should be banned… If I had a room going unused I’d AirBnb
Then explain why this is a global phenomenon?
Because the same causes are happening mostly all over the world. Meaning, buying up houses. Driving up rent, etc.
Accidentally? Man these writers will suck any corporate dick.
Yeah, real hard-hitting journalism here from… arktrek.shop?
There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.
When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don’t actually want to give away.
I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I’m now on the side of “Airbnb is evil”.
A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn’t give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they’ve failed to step in and assist in any way.
Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don’t suffer from.
So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.
This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.
Just had an Airbnb cancel on us in Japan 1 week before our trip… Won’t be doing that again after seeing how little Airbnb gave a shit
I’ve heard a lot of people having this problem. Airbnb is next to useless, even with their guarantee.
Prices goes up, other hotels are booked solid, there are fewer options and travelers are left in the cold.
A big brand would be less likely to risk their reputation over $50 or $100/night difference if there’s some new big event in the area
Yeah, but on the same token you don’t want to give hotels the monopoly… There is so much price gouging if they know some big event is happening in town. Plus many areas have fuck all for hotel capacity. I do AirBNB because I don’t have $150 every time I want to go to a city. I wish we’d have capsule hotels
What you describe is just another example of poor urban planning + untapped market of public transport.
Are you implying that AirBNB hosts don’t do this price gouging as well?
US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.
This is happening worldwide. It has very little to do with urban planning and more with lax homeownership restrictions that allows the wealthy and corporations to scoop up housing supply for profit.
It’s both.
An example of bad urban planning is low density urban sprawl, which requires lots of resources for few housing units.
Less housing, price go up. High build cost, price go up.
“The wealthy and corporations” have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they’ll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain’t nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).
There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.
(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.
Soil consumption is one of the many environmental problems we face. Polluting and consuming more soil to condition the market is nonsense IMHO. Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents. This also addresses the issue of locals being pushed further and further away in the cities they live, which creating more houses doesn’t solve (it will just be the next round of isolated dormitory periferic areas, which have already tons of problems).
Short term rentals for houses was a very good and lucrative idea, but it’s harmful to basically everyone but the landlords who rent out houses there. As such, we should simply strongly regulate it to discourage it as much as possible, if not banning it directly.
Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents
Berlin did exactly that: You can rent out your apartment for IIRC 30 days a year, or while you’re also living there, if you want to rent out more you need a hotel license and tough luck getting one while there’s a housing shortage, least of all for a flat in a residential area.
But OTOH that’s all only taking the edge off there’s been decades of under-investment in social housing in Germany overall, and the little social housing that got built got built via attaching conditions to building permits for private investors, those apartments lose their social housing status after 20 or such years.
And it’s not like there aren’t companies who want to build, and build plenty – but they don’t because they can’t recoup costs, not in this market where every rich fuck who can afford rent already is living somewhere else: Building costs are too high. Some of that is building standards, permitting, etc, but the bulk of it is financing costs, that is, interest on loans for new construction is way too high. Getting at land is not always easy but there’s plenty of mechanisms such as municipalities having right of first refusal for any land sale (if they want to, that’s another topic). There’s really only one way out of this and it’s state coffers because the capital market certainly isn’t going to get less greedy.
Agree. Social housing has been one of the first areas to suffer from cuts everywhere. It is a problem on its own, which short term rental makes worse.
The problem is that building is basically an irreversible use of land. It’s only recently that we started seeing land as a commodity (few centuries) and with the current state of affairs, it’s insane to leave it as such. Soil is too precious and too scarce to let market inefficiencies waste it. We should really explore all options before we decide to simply build more, especially in Europe where the population growth is basically null.
I’ll agree that there is indeed a housing shortage, but I don’t necessarily think that is what’s at play here. Capitalists will always park their money when they see an opportunity to make a return, regardless of industry. Housing has never really been an elastic commodity, it is inelastic in nature due to the time it takes to build and the fact that it is a reasonably sizable asset that doesn’t change hands at the drop of a hat (granted there are market products that contradict this, but I’m going to ignore them for the sake of this conversation). Further, they have always been marketed as an investment vehicle, albeit a long term one.
And while there is plenty of land in the US to build on, housing is only as attractive as it’s local market. Plenty of communities have popped up via ambitious developers, but fall on their faces when the demand is inexistent (California City being a famous example). Better transit options can alleviate this, but people are still drawn to geographic proximity to jobs, schools, entertainment, etc.
Homes in high demand areas fetch a premium because people want to live where they work and play without the commute. These areas are already well developed, and yes had their been more relaxed zoning laws, more housing stock could have been built. But, I would argue that many communities built 50+ years ago were built with the then current demand in mind, not the demand of today. Sure that could be pinned on developers and city authorities not having enough foresight, but I don’t really blame them for not being able to comprehend both prospects of an exploding population and the demand these cities currently see.
Short term rentals are tricky because no one is going to vacation to a suburb 30-45 min from an urban center or destination location, they want to be in the heart of the action. These properties present an ideal investment opportunity for these operators in that a) they purchase an appreciating asset, and b) they generate a short term return. It’s almost a guaranteed profit for them.
Cities saw this problem growing, and should have taken preemptive action. Yet they ignored it because they were listening to moneyed interests. Now that it’s become a full epidemic, it’ll be much harder to contain.
Singapore actually has housing pretty much nailed down. If Singapore had US-style housing policies 95% of Singaporeans would live in Malaysia and commute because only bank execs etc. could afford living in the city.
…also Singapore would have zero green space left. It’d all be single family homes interspersed by parking lots. You can’t spit out a chewing gum over there without hitting a public park.
You can’t chew gum in Singapore at all, maybe this is why
If housing supply is sufficiently elastic
But it takes ages to build houses. You’re again blaming something that’s a given just to ignore that housing is a basic need. Obviously if the basic need is manipulated there’s loads of money to be made.
Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over.
Yeah, and that’s exactly what they chose to do. They contributed to the reasons John Public can’t afford housing, and were rewarded massively for it.
If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.
Yeah, anyone can rob a bank with poor security, but we should still punish the guy who actually robs the bank.
Updoot for wind because Mother Nature doesn’t give a fuck :)
Air BnB effectively pitted average renters and homeowners against the luxury hotel market. From a supply/demand standpoint its basically moving something like 10% of the rental market to the hotel market.
What this does is it means luxury long term rentals slot out the next lower tier of housing at higher pricing it slides down the economic ladder until a percent of people at the bottom is simply outbid for the reduced normal rental housing stock.
Its not airbnb’s fault the market shifted but it is a problem with the market as a result of blending the luxury hotel market with residential housing.
“accidentally” 🤦♂️
It was - and is - entirely fucking intentional.
Oopsie doopsie
Oopsie poopsie…
Because everything went to shit
Maybe they should ban whole home AirBNB… i only ever do rooms.
Theyd part out a hous into multiple rooms. I stayed at one airbnb that were 3 stories and each one was another airbnb, with a kitchen on the main level that had to be shared. No one used it for the 3 days i was there, but still.
You can easily regulate against that.
How
Through the tax code. If you have a short term rental property that’s not a primary residence: shazam busted. You’d need some kind of policing for it but you could force airbnb to make a filing on it as well which would make it possible to automate.
No regulation is worth anything without enforcement.
Sure. That’s step two. You gotta do step one first.
I agree. It wasn’t meant to be against regulations. Problem is in my city we have plenty of regulations to avoid repurposing flats for tourist rentals without a permit, we have regulations against systematically letting flats empty to be able to sell the house or flat at a premium etc. But we only have like three dozen government employees, who are supposed to oversee a city with more than 1.5 million flats and individual homes. So even if every one of them manages to check on 2 flats every day, they manage like 15.000 flats a year, which is already a rather optimistic estimate.
It is crucial to not only demand regulation, but also that enough resources are assigned to enforce them.
I feel like the US is far down on the victims list. Look how they massacred my boys Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands
Prague city center is basically just airbnb flats now
Same in Nashville. It’s a shame. I wish the government would regulate this more.
Just a little fucksy wucksy :3
