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.

  • iopq@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So basically they decided to ban Airbnb. I wouldn’t be surprised if hotels lobbied for this

    • li10@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t be surprised if people living next to Airbnb’s pushed for this as well.

      It’s horrible having holidaymakers show up to an otherwise residential building/area.

        • wahming@monyet.cc
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          1 year ago

          While you’re not wrong about that sentiment, it’s misplaced in this context. Partyers and holidayers make for awful neighbours.

          • SCB@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            So fuck people trying to pay rent because you don’t like people on vacation.

            How exactly is that defensible?

            • wahming@monyet.cc
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              1 year ago

              If you have a property permanently on Airbnb, you’re not ‘trying to pay rent’, what is that nonsense?

                • wahming@monyet.cc
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                  1 year ago

                  If you’re renting a place, and subletting your guest room on Airbnb… This doesn’t stop you, they specifically made this the default case. If for some reason you’ve got a 5 bedroom place or something, maybe consider finding some long term housemates, then. It’s not like there’s a shortage of renters.

            • archiotterpup@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Nah man, fuck people driving up my rent for hosting vacationers. I reported an AirBnB to the city last year and now we have actual tenants.

          • SCB@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes and that reason was originally safety, and now is “protecting my investments” at the cost of not having enough housing.

            • merridew@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              How is a law ending the stealth conversion of residentially zoned areas into commercial a net negative for housing?

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Apartments are not commercially zoned, and neither are AirBnBs.

                Both should be added to mixed zoning. That would be dope. Stores on the bottom, or alternating floors, with very dense buildings above current height restrictions, is basically the ideal solution.

                • merridew@feddit.uk
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                  1 year ago

                  Apartments are residentially zoned. Hotels are commercially zoned (for good reason).

                  Turning residential homes into unregulated mini-hotels at scale depletes housing stock, and is a nuisance to residents.

                  This law effectively blocks residential homes from continuing to be used as hotel businesses operating out of residentially zoned areas, allowing residential units to once again be used as housing, and removing the nuisance to residents.

                  Please explain why you see this as a NIMBY net negative for housing.

                  • SCB@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Mixed use zoning is absolutely the way forward everywhere, but most especially for already-dense cities like NYC. “Nuisance to residents” is always, and will always, be a terrible reason to do anything. A nuisance isn’t a health concern, but a preference. Their preferences are irrelevant when the market is on fire.

                    There are 40k AirBnBs in NYC, and a housing shortage of literally millions of units. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/05/25/new-yorks-housing-shortage-pushes-up-rents-and-homelessness#:~:text=The problem is acute in,%2C and Houston (5).

                    This is not a big enough number to actually dent the housing shortage, and a not-insignificant number of these people are doing part-time rentals to make ends meet, which means they’re gonna get evicted. Meanwhile, the landlords people are bemoaning will simply rent their properties at the AirBnB rate to not lose income since the net housing has not meaningfully shifted.

        • li10@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          How so?

          Not disagreeing, just having a hard time working out your point.

          • SCB@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Comes from another comment I posted here:

            New York City’s housing stock has only increased 4% since 2010, not nearly enough to keep up with its 22% increase in jobs. And from 2017 to 2021, New York City permitted 13 homes for every 1,000 residents in 2017

            This is because of zoning restrictions preventing building. This occurs everywhere you see housing spiking, which distorts even the areas where building is occurring.

            People don’t want “those people” in their neighborhoods or don’t want to lose their “neighborhood character,” or simply want to “protect their home values,” and so a persistent lack of supply is strangling the market.

            Denying current renters an income stream, tightening the grip of the hotel market monopoly, and not actually freeing enough homes to impact the increase in demand, is not the solution.

            • li10@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              That’s fair, but I think it’s not particularly relevant here.

              Tourists should not be holidaying in people’s “back yards”.

              It’s not about keeping out certain “types of people”, it’s about not wanting any people who have specifically come to holiday and treat the area like their playground.

              And every Airbnb I know is run by someone who has multiple properties, and certainly isn’t letting holidaymakers live in their actual home.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Tourists should not be holidaying in people’s “back yards

                Literally just NIMBYism.

                • li10@feddit.uk
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                  1 year ago

                  Okay, ignore the rest of what I said and focus on your little buzzword 🤷‍♂️

                  I don’t want someone to knock down the house next door and start fracking the land, is that NiMbYiSm?

            • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              New York isn’t like other places - it is quite literally out of available land to build residential structures. NIMBYism may have an affect, but the overwhelming restriction in preventing new construction is that you’d have to raze structures to do so.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Renters absolutely benefit from AirBnB if they were using the money to help bridge costs, which nearly every single article on this subject mentions.

                And Landlords benefit a lot more from tighter housing restrictions.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                That’s irrelevant because net increases to supply still move toward closing the supply/demand gap, and people further down the chain just move into vacated homes as people move into the new ones.

                • archiotterpup@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, that’s not happening. Those prices also go up. That’s because the invisible hand isn’t invisible. It’s greedy landlords jacking up rents.

                  Your theory is cute but it doesn’t match reality.

                  • SCB@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    It’s not happening because demand still outstrips supply by a huge amount. What is happening when building occurs is a mitigation of cost increases, but the production is not not enough to lower costs .

                    The thing about supply and demand is that it exists even if you don’t like it.

    • uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      airbnb has a lot of hate from a lot of directions in NYC. Hotels, yes, but also from renters and homeowners.

      Airbnb units remove long term rentals from the market, in a city which is desparately short on affordable, middle, and even luxury housing units.

      Airbnb units in condos and coops (which usually violata the bylaws) create noise and safety conditions.

    • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Probably held a bidding auction between hotels and air bnb. The hotels must have had deeper pockets to buy up a piece of legislation in a democratic system. How good is freedom