
Senator Elizabeth Warren joins call for Airbnb probe - Jerry2
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/287555-warren-joins-colleagues-in-asking-for-probe-of-services-like-airbnb
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SmellTheGlove
While I'd agree that services like AirBNB could use some light regulation, I'm
always concerned that this becomes about protecting the lodging industry. I'd
really rather it not get to the point where we're restricting individuals from
renting out their home, and I'd wonder how much you can really regulate that
without stepping all over property rights.

This seems like a fishing expedition.

~~~
awesomerobot
I tend to disagree. Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the US to
live in right now — we have a low housing inventory at the moment, and it's
incredibly frustrating to see someone buy a property with cash, develop it,
and then essentially use it as an unsanctioned hotel. There are AirBNB
slumlords out there.

AirBNB seems intended to give homeowners flexibility to rent out some space,
but when that model starts shifting to developers creating what are
essentially unregulated and unzoned hotels it creates a situation that sucks
for potential homeowners and neighborhoods alike. You can suddenly have a
neighbor or a apartment in the same building become a revolving door for
strangers who don't care about the community, who are giving money to
landlords who simply aren't present.

I think in this case some light regulation can make a big difference and give
more power back to smaller home/property owners.

~~~
bpodgursky
The impact on housing prices is trivial compared to the ridiculous under-
supply of hotels in most major cities.

To the point where it has priced-out the ability of anyone under the upper-
middle class from visiting most major cities as tourists. How is a middle
class family supposed to pay $400/night to rent a room in NY?

Being able to travel shouldn't be artificially priced at a point where hotels
are a crushing expense; visiting NYC isn't just for the 1%. You're just
playing along with the hotel cartel here.

~~~
JonFish85
"hotel cartel here."

I really don't think hotels are the ones truly at fault here. The way Airbnb
competes on price is mostly due to not having to pay for things that hotels
have to. The cities & states themselves are the ones who decide what sort of
insurance hotels have to have, what sort of zoning rules apply, taxes to levy,
rules that they have to follow.

Taxes are very high on hotel stays, generally. And this is usually because
it's easier for someone to raise "other people's" taxes rather than their own
(e.g. tax the out-of-towners).

People seem to claim things like how "hotels legislate a moat" all the time,
but ultimately I really don't think it's the hotels, it's the town/city/state
and the citizens thereof that have decided what they want to legislate. And
that's inconvenient for a startup looking to "disrupt" things, but I find it
quite scummy.

~~~
yellow_postit
Maybe at some % of occupancy an AirBnB stops being spare space and becomes
more hotel-like and needs to start collecting the same types of taxes,
providing insurance, etc.

~~~
JonFish85
I'd be curious to see what % of Airbnb rentals are 100% occupied by the
guests. I suspect that it's a majority of them, but I don't have any data to
back that up with.

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whatnotests
FTA: "The letter, led by Schatz (D-Hawaii), was also signed by Sen. Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.)."

Hawaii - a state which is basically owned by the Hawaiian Tourism Authority.

Feinstein - make your own judgement there.

I don't see this going in a great direction.

~~~
djschnei
Nah, they def only want to help the little.

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brandonmenc
A municipality should be able to amend their zoning laws if they don't want
Airbnb operating there, correct?

An FTC investigation into the effect of Airbnb on local economies is fine, but
I hope it doesn't result in one-size-fits-all federal regulation.

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toss1
Of course the immediate Zeitgeist of the comments here is that this is about
protection of entrenched interests and quashing of innovation.

Sure, there may be some of that.

However, we in the tech community need to recognize that doing something at
scale creates a fundamental difference of kind, not merely of quantity. Of
course, to a large degree, that is the point of much modern tech, to take
something that was simply local word-of-mouth stuff ("oh, my friend's got an
apartment empty next month, perhaps you two can work out house-sitting for
your visit" or "oh, she needs a ride to town too") and turning it into an
instant service, globally scaled. This is what creates $billions of value with
minimal infrastructure.

However, it is nonsense to say that there are no negative externalities, or
that they are all trivial and ignore-able, or merely old incumbents protecting
their ill-gotten economic territory.

Consider another potential technology that could be easily scaled -- speeding
tickets. Instead of relying on the local cop to manually measure your speed,
chase you down, write a ticket and testify in court, they could simply get the
data off your smartphone and ticket you ever time you sent over-speed. They
could just argue that "this is just the same law as we've always had". But the
result would be that instead of maybe one ticket every X+ years, most of us
would get multiple tickets every time we drove outside of a traffic jam. It
would fundamentally change everything about driving and the related economy.

Similarly, it's one thing when a few people casually rent out a room for a few
days a year, or get a house-sitter when they go on vacation. But, it is
altogether different when the information exchange infrastructure becomes
sufficiently reliable and networked that it makes sense for people to run
lodging as a business, even buying houses just for that purpose.

This substantially distorts the real estate market, and dumps a lot of
externalities on neighbors. It is one thing to buy a house or condo on the
assumption that the neighbors are all residents with investment in the
neighborhood/building -- quite another to expect that all of the people around
you are completely transient. And, of course, even worse when the situation
changes after you've moved in.

So, please think a bit before jumping on the "they're all ignorant Luddites"
bandwagon...

(edit - grammar/clarity)

~~~
SmellTheGlove
> Of course the immediate Zeitgeist of the comments here is that this is about
> protection of entrenched interests and quashing of innovation.

> So, think before jumping on the "they're all ignorant Luddites" bandwagon...

The immediate reaction being to protect entrenched interests has nothing to do
with the "ignorant Luddites" as far as I'm concerned. I'm thinking more, when
was the last time a Federal regulator probed something in order to actually
benefit the little guy?

AirBNB by its nature creates very local issues. I think the appropriate place
to look and regulate is at the local level. Towns and residents can take it
upon themselves to restrict unwanted activities or they can choose not to,
based on the impacts to their communities. Going bigger than that with
anything more than light regulation would promote a one size fits all
approach, which wouldn't work considering towns and cities are very different
from one another.

~~~
toss1
Reasonable impulse to go for local regs, but we're talking about global
services here.

Is it a good idea to expect that a global service be forced to deal with a
crazy-quilt patchwork of likely conflicting local regs? Obviously the service
wants no reg, but if they're smart, they should want single fed regs, vs
potentially unlimited local versions.

And of course, are there federal concerns vs local concerns, e.g., taxation,
undeclared income, effects on the capital gain on the buildings (someone
renting out a house regularly shouldn't get the same cap gains exception as on
a building used fully as a primary residence), etc., which make it pretty
reasonable to look at it from that level.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
The issues and concerns raised are almost entirely local. So yes, I think
local regulation is most appropriate, even if that's more challenging for the
business. To me it doesn't matter how the business wants to be regulated. It
matters more why the regulation is required, and where it's needed. Almost all
of that is at the local level. Beyond that, I'm not sure that you could
regulate it Federally as the power to regulate these matters tends to be
reserved to the states, and delegated to the local government. Property is
almost always regulated where it is physically located.

Federal taxation is a wholly separate issue. It arises out of the commercial
gains, not the use of the land. Put another way, we don't intermingle Federal
tax and permissible activities, the tax code doesn't tell you that you can't
use your boat a certain way to generate income. It just speaks to what taxes
you pay on the income (sometimes the income generated in that manner).

~~~
toss1
Sure, to the extent that it's entirely local, local-scale regs would likely be
appropriate. However, it looks like they're specifically looking at national-
scale distortions in the market. While I haven't examined the data supporting
that, I would not be surprised to see large-scale distortions from a system
designed to produce large-scale effects.

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jswny
Sounds like they are worried about a large-scale disruption to the lodging
industry similar to what Uber did/is doing in the taxi industry.

~~~
jaboutboul
You mean they are worried about PROGRESS and INNOVATION in the lodging
industry which gives consumers choice and funnels money away from the people
who pay the lobbyists who pay them.

~~~
davesque
That's one extreme view on this. Remember that zoning exists for a reason.
Imagine if you owned a house and both of the neighboring houses turned into
full-time AirBNB rentals. Sometimes the guests were nice, but sometimes they
weren't and treated the place like somewhere to party and forget about.

~~~
JoshTriplett
And it's really easy for AirBnB to know exactly who rented the property for a
given period, so if they do anything illegal (which includes noise
violations), they'd be easy to track down with a warrant.

If you're not affecting your neighbors, it's nobody's business what you do on
your property, including letting other people live there. If you want to
regulate, add some additional regulations about behavior that affects
neighboring properties but isn't currently covered.

~~~
JonFish85
"And it's really easy for AirBnB to know exactly who rented the property for a
given period, so if they do anything illegal (which includes noise
violations), they'd be easy to track down with a warrant."

You say that, but there are currently many, many cities trying to get Airbnb
to deal with their illegal apartments, and yet Airbnb is stalling on that
(presumably because if you shut down their illegal apartments, their valuation
would implode).

To your point, "affecting your neighbors" is a pretty tough thing to track
down. Even _if_ things seem to be going well, there's a difference between
having stable neighbors who take care of the neighborhood and an unknown
rolling of the dice every few days. If you have kids, it's an even bigger
risk. It's very difficult to accurately judge just how much of an impact it
has, which is why cities have set up zoning regulations.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> You say that, but there are currently many, many cities trying to get Airbnb
> to deal with their illegal apartments

Why should AirBnB want to help jurisdictions that are trying to shut it down
completely under the guise of "illegal apartments/hotels"? It's an entirely
different matter to help keep the residents of AirBnB rentals behaving well
and not disturbing their neighbors, which seems completely reasonable.

> there's a difference between having stable neighbors who take care of the
> neighborhood

There's no guarantee that "stable" neighbors care either, and "take care of
the neighborhood" would need to be a lot more precise to be either enforceable
or appropriate. There's a reason we specifically looked for a house _without_
a "neighborhood association", and several people I know who currently have
such associations would like to get out from under them. Banning AirBnB does
sound consistent with neighborhood-association-style politics, though.

Saying you want to regulate tenancy duration rather than behavior seems a lot
like choosing to reject browsers based on User-Agent rather than doing feature
detection. All tenants should behave well regardless of tenancy duration; any
well-behaved neighbor should be equivalently fine regardless of tenancy
duration.

> If you have kids, it's an even bigger risk.

"Think of the children!" does not increase the weight of your argument. You're
talking very nebulously about risk. The previous comments were specifically
complaining about things like noise and late-night parties.

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loudin
Hold on - a lot of these comments here are assuming that this probe will
result in more regulation for AirBnb, but according to the article, it seems
like these senators are only calling for the FTC to study the impact companies
like AirBnB have on the short-term rental market and the housing market.

How is this a bad thing? Isn't gathering more data better than not having this
data?

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pbhowmic
The headline is really at odds with the article itself. A probe would look
into evidence of wrongdoing. The article is talking about data gathering on
the impact of services such as AirBnB.

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eric_h
OT, but holy god that website is awful. I loaded it in a background tab and 5
minutes later that tab's process was up to 10GB of ram, and I have an ad
blocker and flash disabled.

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DominikR
It's not about protecting some industry, it is about the fact that people have
an income with Airbnb that often isn't declared.

Where ever there is money made, the government wants a cut.

If it creates too much overhead because of too many small fish where it's hard
to track them it will usually be outlawed.

