
S.F. ballot measure would severely limit short-term rentals - protomyth
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/S-F-ballot-measure-would-severely-limit-5436664.php
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dougmccune
As an SF resident, I'd support something that allowed short-term rentals only
if the host is present and the host is the owner. Permanent AirBnB units don't
help the housing market in the city.

I find it funny that AirBnB's justification is that their users rely on the
money to make ends meet. But at the same time, if you're taking a unit off the
legit long-term rental market to put it on the permanent short-term AirBnB
market you are by definition driving up rents for everyone in the city by
reducing the supply of rentals. So the justification is: "San Francisco is so
expensive, our customers need the ability to drive up rents even more because
rents are so high!"

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alwaysdoit
I guess the question I have is, should someone be able to do a housing swap?
Say, let someone trade use their home in SF for a week in exchange for use of
the other party's home in NY? Does that need to be regulated?

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dougmccune
I agree that there's a huge grey area in terms of defining what crosses the
line. I should be able to let my buddy stay at my place if I'm not here. I
also don't have a problem if places that legitimately would have just been
empty are rented to tourists (ie I'm traveling for 3 weeks and otherwise would
just leave my place empty).

The thing that's not OK is when someone realizes they can rent out their place
as a permanent hotel to tourists and get more income than renting it out to
residents. So I think a first step is to stop the ability to convert a rental
unit serving residents into a hotel for tourists. Then the more nuanced stuff
beyond that will take a lot more debate.

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btgeekboy
Perhaps the solution is that the host must have the property as their primary
residence. This implies they spend over half of the year at that property.

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wpietri
That's nice and simple. It also covers my case: after my mom died, I went and
spent a summer back home. It was great to be able to rent my place out here to
cover the cost of renting a place there.

And I think there's a good incentive there. I was very choosy about who I let
stay, because I was letting them into my own home. I didn't want anybody
stealing my books or breaking my things. For a unit set up as a virtual hotel
room, I expect people would be less careful about guests.

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geuis
As a SF resident, I'm opposed to any regulation at all. I'm a long term renter
(same house, 7 years) and my lease prevents subletting. That's exactly where
the responsibility and regulation should lie, at the feet of the home owner.
If I own a piece of property or have a lease that allows it, then I should
have the free choice to do with that property what I want in regards to
something like Airbnb. In my case, the owner of my house doesn't want that.
Other owners do. A friend just purchased a condo for a _lot_ of money. He
should be free to do with his condo what he wants.

How far does this line of thinking extend? What about small startups that work
out of someone's house or apartment? They're doing commercial activity in an
unzoned area, so that should be banned too.

How about coffee shops? Coffee shops are generally licensed to sell coffee and
non-cooked (on premises) goods. Want to sell sandwiches made on site? That's a
different (expensive) license. Beer and wine? Same thing. So coffee shops
aren't licensed to be places of business for customers to perform commercial
activity. We should ban engineers working from cafes too.

I've always liked the petition
([http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html](http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html))
Bastiat sent to the French Parliament proposing that they block out the sun to
benefit French candle makers. Its in the same vein as a Modest Proposal from
Swift about the Irish poor.

We're seeing government protectionism of new competing services against
established and entrenched businesses, i.e. taxi medallions vs Uber/Lyft,
hotels vs Airbnb, city-built fiber vs Comcast/Time Warner.

This is dangerous. It limits competition and competition is almost always good
for customers.

We need to stop this from happening in SF.

~~~
wdewind
While I generally favor a less-regulation approach, you're missing the core
issue here: short-term rentals have a negative effect on neighborhoods because
they change the incentives of the people living the house from those of a
neighbor to those of a visitor. This is precisely what zoning regulations are
designed to protect.

> How far does this line of thinking extend? What about small startups that
> work out of someone's house or apartment? They're doing commercial activity
> in an unzoned area, so that should be banned too.

The difference is that no one around the startup is going to complain because
they aren't impacting their neighborhood negatively.

Short term rentals are decisions you make for your neighborhood without their
consent. The feedback mechanism that would replace regulation on Airbnb is
unfortunately limited to only the guests who stay, which are not all of the
stakeholders affected by any means.

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geuis
I appreciate your point of view, but this is just supposition. As far as I
know, there have been no actual studies done related to the effect of
independent rentals using the Airbnb model on neighborhoods.

My own opinion is that property owners have the ability to do what they will
with that property up to the limits of established laws. This means that with
no existing laws to prevent action, those actions are allowable.

Based on that opinion, and unless some studies are done that factually
demonstrate negative impacts on neighborhoods, no pre-emptive laws should be
passed restricting this activity.

~~~
wdewind
Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted, I upvoted fwiw.

Yeah I agree, I'd like to see this studied more in depth, because I also don't
find the hotel industry to be unbiased in the discussion.

It is _not_ supposition because it happened to me: someone in my building was
Airbnb-ing their apartment and the building had significant damage to public
walk ways, parties thrown on roof til 4am on week nights etc.

If you look through my comment history you'll see I'm, admittedly, completely
biased because of that.

Again, as you said, I'd love to see a study.

I think it would be totally reasonable to also have a public place where I
could see all units in my building that are currently being short-term leased,
as well as a place to complain.

I don't think all out illegality is the only response here, but Airbnb (and
VBRO etc.) are not handling this properly yet.

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dvcc
I still think it is crazy that Airbnb has an evaluation of $10 Billion, when
in its most active markets it is against the law.

If the penalties come to pass, which they probably won't, I wonder how it will
actually affect usage.

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frandroid
If the law is not enforced at all when there are rampant, clear violations,
then it's irrelevant whether it's technically illegal or not. Now the game's
about to change though...

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baddox
And in fact, I would argue that a law which is not consistently enforced is by
definition not a good law.

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brryant
I hope SROs in San Francisco get as much administrative attention as short
term rentals. Decade old legislation severely hindering the development of
downtown SF.

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dang
We changed the url from [1]. Submitters: please double-check what you post for
links to more original sources.

1\. [http://gigaom.com/2014/04/30/a-reward-for-turning-in-
airbnb-...](http://gigaom.com/2014/04/30/a-reward-for-turning-in-airbnb-users-
new-sf-proposal-is-harshest-yet/)

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timr
I submitted this yesterday under the current URL, so that probably would have
failed. I think a lot of people submit alternate URLs for articles that failed
to get traction due to bad timing or whatever.

~~~
protomyth
Actually, I submitted because I liked how it was summarized and linked to the
new york story. Original sources don't seem to be valued by folks up voting.

[edit] can moderators change the submitter to the person who originally
submitted this article?

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timr
Haha. Don't worry about it. I was just pointing out why someone might not have
submitted the original.

(One of these days I might be able to trade in my karma points for the _really
big_ stuffed animal, but for now, it's just mustache combs...)

~~~
protomyth
I was hoping for a go cart, I remember those from the back of comics.....

On the article, Reason Magazine's article is
[http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/30/san-francisco-new-
airbnb-s...](http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/30/san-francisco-new-airbnb-
snitch-plan) "San Francisco May Wind Up Paying Residents to Snitch on
Neighbors Using Airbnb" \- nice for the headline to be the tldr

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calbear81
What if we changed the equation and brought landlords in on the action without
having to evict renters? Having followed this topic for quite a while, I think
these points are generally accepted:

\- People are more okay with host-present room/couch rentals than full
apartment rentals. \- Landlords are pissed about rent-controlled units being
arbitraged by their renters. \- Everyone just wants to make some money

Landlords can agree to a renter doing AirBnB if they are willing to profit-
share with the landlord via some type of 3rd party rental management service.
The landlord would have to ensure that everyone in a building agrees to this
or at least you set up floors for "sublet-allowed" units so folks know what
they're getting into.

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anigbrowl
I predict this will make it onto the ballot easily and give it a 60% chance of
passage.

EDIT: Downvoters, a prediction is not the same thing as an endorsement.

~~~
Crito
The downvotes were probably more about the worth of your comment. Your opinion
and some off the cuff percentage aren't really interesting without some sort
of accompanying justification or analysis. Why do you think it will make it to
the ballot easily, and why specifically 60% odds of passing?

~~~
anigbrowl
It's a hunch, for sure. I actually wrote a few hundred words on why I thought
so, but scrapped it because it's basically just rationalization rather than
based on specific data. The pros and cons of AirBNB have been debated to death
on HN for the last few years, so I saw no point in repeating those arguments.

But to flesh it out a bit: the threshold for getting something onto the ballot
is around 9500 signatures, while the # of registered voters is in SF is just
under 500k. Getting 2% of the electorate to sign a ballot petition on a hot-
button local issue is easy in SF.

As for passage, I've written at length before on the conflicting economic
interests of landlords, renters, and other property owners, and how SF's
restrictive geography leads to the adoption of zero-sum strategies. For a
better and fuller explanation; I'd refer you to that long TechCrunch article
on SF's housing crisis: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-
housing/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/)

I predict passage with a healthy margin because the larger problems are rather
intractable, but it suits all stakeholders to make AirBNB a scapegoat for the
city's structural economic problems. There are a lot of landlords, renters,
and property owners who _don 't_ like AirBNB for different reasons, and short-
term rentals give them something to agree about and lower political tension.
Also, everyone knows someone with ludicrously cheap rent thanks to rent
control, and punishing people who exploit that for personal gain will be
popular (even though the number of people who do so and get away with it is
tiny). If the proponents of the measure take out the 'snitching reward'
mechanism and instead direct that 30% of the fines go to some popular local
hobbyhorse like (much-needed) road repairs, support will probably go up.

Opponents of the ballot initiatives should avoid characterizing it as a dark
horse backed by the hotel industry or service workers union, whether or not
that is actually the case, but push the Chiu measure instead. Short-term
rental proponents have been almost comically tone-deaf about how their
arguments sound to people who can't/won't participate in the STR market
themselves.

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rsgalloway
Another reason to never own property in SF or NY.

