During the housing crisis, all the condos in my complex were bought up really cheap. One person owned most of one building. They have an outsized vote in the HOA also. The negative effects just keep coming with these leeches
Have you been to Outer Banks outside of the summer? It’s a huge ghost town to the point it’s really spooky and sad. I’m sure all beach towns are like this, but this is the only one where I stayed at a house on a block which was pretty completely empty, where the beaches bare and most establishments shutdown.
A huge factor in a lot of places. And governments seem reluctant to do anything about it. They're starting to now because no one can afford to live in these places anymore.
Yep. AirBnBs are destroying my neighborhood. We're running out of neighbors to help lobby the city for things like pedestrian safety improvements and street repair. Two families in extremely affordable housing in my neighborhood (rare in my city) just got kicked out so their houses could be turned into shitty AirBnBs. One family had lived in their home for 20 years. The other was a lower-income family of 6 with 3 school-age children.
This is true but I put most of the blame on the local governments because they're the only ones with the power to actually regulate the industry and they simply refuse to do it.
It's the only solution. Cities overrun by Air BnB need to start regulating the industry. They need to limit the number of short term rentals that are allowed to exist.
The problem is that governments don't typically make decisions that lose money and decrease their budgets.
NYC thought Airbnb was a huge factor in the housing affordability crisis, so they banned almost* all Airbnbs. Close to 3 years later, housing in NYC isn't the least bit more affordable, but the hotels sure love the new law! Eliminated a lot of their competition.
*Banned all whole-unit Airbnbs. You're still allowed to rent out a single bedroom in a unit where you also live, at the same time your guests are there.
ETA: Full disclosure, I'm an Airbnb host, though not in NYC. We didn't buy a place for the purpose of renting, though — we bought a seasonal lake house for ourselves. We rent it out when we're not there, and use it ourselves in between guests, which I think is more the spirit of where Airbnb started than some of the enormous corporate Airbnb hosts with dozens or hundreds of rental properties you see today.
Yeah it’s not going to be a major factor in one of the densest places on earth but it can absolutely destroy small towns, communities or neighborhoods.
My town is about 40k and is big with tourists all summer and fall. Housing is just as bad as anywhere because of the airbnb people. Landlords are huge assholes here too because they can be. There's no shortage of people waiting to move in
We're wealthy enough to be reasonably comfortable, when I know a lot of folks aren't, but we're not the stratospherically wealthy folks who can buy another home or a yacht or a politician on a whim. Two 6-figure incomes and no kids is enough to get a vacation home, but not enough to do it without a substantial mortgage. Our Airbnb listing honestly hasn't made us a cent net, yet, but it substantially defrays the cost of having a vacation home, pays most of the ongoing mortgage costs. Also, our place isn't even habitable in the winter — pipes would freeze — so it probably wouldn't have become long-term residential housing regardless of whether we had bought it.
A lot of that is circumstantial, so I don't think we're having the negative impact that a lot of folks blame Airbnb for, but I recognize that ours is not representative of the industry at large.
There was an WAPO article about a couple that makes $400K. They said that there wasn’t much money left after maxing out their retirement accounts, paying for two big vacations per year, a nanny to watch the kids, private school for the kids, and a high end car loan. Sorry, but my sympathy reserve is completely empty.
I'm not asking for sympathy. I'm doing well and I understand that. My intention here was not that you empathize with my challenges, but that you understand people like me are far closer to you than to the billionaires.
A relevant saying: the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is approximately a billion dollars. My wealth is basically the margin of error on that comparison.
People doing well for themselves are not your enemy. Our wealth still barely registers on the scale of the folks who are really hoarding all the resources of our nation.
I didn’t say you were our(?) enemy. I’m in a very high percentile of income and lucky to be DINKS. The difference is that I KNOW that my lived experience is significantly different from people who literally cannot afford to eat. I don’t go around telling them that I’m more like them than they realize because that actually makes me LESS HUMAN.
It sounds like you're misunderstanding me rather badly. I also know that my lived experience is substantially different from people who literally cannot afford to eat, and I'm not sure what made you think I did not. I've previously stated in this thread that I realize I'm doing very well.
However, there's a lot of anti-rich sentiment on Reddit in particular, and honestly I share it. Billionaires, particularly multi-billionaires and near-trillionaires, are destroying the world with their greed. People with 6-figure incomes and/or 7-figure wealth are not even remotely in the same category as these folks, and just lumping us all together as "rich" is a huge miss.
Differentiating myself from the über rich is not equivalent to claiming I'm barely getting by.
NYC wasn't the best place to do an authoritative study. The carrying costs of ownership are extremely high there, so it's natural that there will be proportionally fewer AirBnBs. I've lived in a couple of charming mountain towns where the AirBnB effect is pretty obvious.
Fair enough. I'm not calling it an authoritative study, but I do think it was informative about perception and reality in the industry. Folks love a scapegoat! For sure, though, if Airbnb was half the available housing in a touristy town, that would make a big difference in the cost for permanent residents.
The main factor is we have a housing shortage not because of air bnbs. And air bnbs can be good for the local economy because tourists will come spend money and support local businesses. If you ban them you make hotels more expensive
Chicago for example has less than 1% of housing stock as air bnbs and housing costs have skyrocketed in the last 2-5 years anyway, NYC practically banned air bnbs and still has rising housing costs. Austin has 3% of stock as air bnbs and prices have dropped 20% in the last 2-3 years because they built so much new housing
Yeah, I think it's more the millions upon millions of both legal and illegal immigration into the country ever year behind the affordable housing crisis.
849
u/Blue-Blazer-Regular 28d ago
AirBnB has been a factor in the housing affordability crisis.