
Did Airbnb Kill the Mountain Town? - pmcpinto
https://www.outsideonline.com/2198726/did-airbnb-kill-mountain-town
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mistermann
So much money is floating to the top x% that even just renting to them on
weekends is more lucrative than renting to locals 365 days per year. Where are
people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless?

I guess we still have some buffer room as most people still have some
disposable income that doesn't go to rent, but when that cap is hit, then
what?

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Jabanga
I know it sounds like free market dogma, but I swear this is true: supply
grows to meet demand. Airbnb will just encourage more housing to be built, by
creating a new short term housing market that until now had not existed.

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chongli
That doesn't work for mountain towns. When skyscraper condos start going up it
ceases to be a mountain town.

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Jabanga
The parent comment asked:

"Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless?"

They can go to places that aren't mountain towns. EDIT: or they can build new
mountain towns. There is no shortage of mountains.

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matheweis
There is a shortage of water, though, unless you solve desalination and
pumping it up the several miles of elevation...

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Jabanga
Right but there's no shortage of mountains where new towns can be built. If
people _really_ want to live in mountain towns, the market can meet that
demand for pretty much any number of people.

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ghaff
And, in fact, there are tons of "mountain towns" where real estate is cheap.
They just aren't chi-chi mountain towns with cute coffee shops and gourmet
restaurants often associated with world class ski areas.

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oisino
The fact that airbnb is negative for rental rates and hurts locals is Airbnb
biggest existential threat. In reality renters outnumber home owners that do
Airbnb thus when it comes to regulations people will vote for more regulation
long term.

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nateberkopec
I moved to Taos, New Mexico last year, a ski town with a huge Airbnb market,
like Crested Butte. It has definitely increased long term rental prices around
here, but, to a former NYC resident like me, they were pretty low to begin
with.

Taos, thankfully, has a lot of factors which prevent it from becoming the next
Jackson Hole or Crested Butte. For one, unlike those towns, we have a lot of
land. Taos isn't really hemmed in by National Forests and has plenty of room
for new construction. Second, Taos was fairly large to begin with: 15,000
people or so in the greater area, so Airbnb has a more muted effect.

It seems like a very mixed bag to me. Long term rental prices keep going way
up, but many locals seem to be making a lot of money renting out (of course,
only the ones who can afford to own in the first place). The city also seems
to make a decent amount of money from lodgers tax as well.

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ghaff
Of course, ski towns have also had a short, long, and midterm rental market
since long before there was an AirBnB. For a number of years after school, a
group of us rented a ski condo decades ago.

I'm a bit curious about this trend generally. Skiing as a sport isn't growing
much and I believe it's still below pre-recession heights overall. Of course
that's not the only reason to stay in a mountain town but it tends to be a big
one in the winter.

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olivermarks
I have a neighbor who grew up in Venice beach (a coastal town within greater
Los Angeles). His parents live in the same house he grew up in. It's always
been somewhat touristy, especially on the oceanfront, but since the digital
STR wave he says it has rapidly destroyed the neighborhood. The challenge is
lots of late night activity - people talking loudly in the streets, screaming
etc, drink and drugs, and just a general itinerant population of people who
come and go, adding nothing to the locality. I know this reads like a 'get off
my lawn' mentality, but it is surprising how quickly a place can lose its
ambiance and atmosphere - the things that made it attractive to visit - when
the population becomes dominated by faceless, ever changing visitors. It seems
anywhere 'interesting' is suffering from these issues...

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ng12
Wow, those are some military-grade nostalgia goggles. Venice Beach was never a
sleepy beach town, it was always kind of earthy with a healthy dosing of
weekend revilers. The only thing that changed was the surfer dudes now own
million dollar "quaint beachfront townhouses" and care about noise levels and
the wrong type of people visiting their neighborhood.

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matheweis
I recently relocated out of a small mountain town to a job in the city, so
this article resonated poignantly. The bit about everyone either having a
second job or a second home is so true!

I owned my home and did not have this problem with housing directly, but
rising costs of living (possibly a side effect of rising rents for the rest of
the workers?) and a reduction in the available jobs in the area led to me
being available to recruiters.

In the end it was a positive thing, and I landed a position at one of the
major tech companies that was very top on my list. But it was still a bit sad
to go...

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lechiffre10
Highly doubt Airbnb will be around in the next 10-15 years. If Hotels can
catch up and get with the program they could easily get people to stop renting
on Airbnb. Oddly enough the people who complained about rent control and
increased rent prices in cities now ask for crazy prices on Airbnb when
renting their room ( even if they have 3-4 roommates) It just isn't worth it
anymore unless you're a group of 6-7 people. Might as well just get a hotel.

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heylook
You can't actually kill the idea of a platform connecting travelers with
decentralized supply. Sure, it's possible that the specific company Airbnb
might not exist in the future, but there will always be people interested in
exchanging spare housing capacity for money, and with the increasing ease of
long-distance travel, I'd expect that population to only grow in the future.
Maybe the dominant platform will be Airbnb, maybe it'll be HomeAway. Maybe
it'll be Craigslist.

Hotels are actually really poorly positioned to fight Airbnb et al, since they
face the huge capital costs of building/owning/maintaining giant buildings.
Sure, they might win fights to change regulation or enforcement in some number
of markets for some amount of time, but they'll never be able to spin supply
up or down as nimbly as the marketplace platforms that don't own their own
inventory.

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baus
I've been renting my house out on Airbnb in Tahoe. It is a house I lived in
for many years myself. I hear these concerns all the time, but Tahoe has
always had vacation rentals, and in my opinion the real solution is to build
more units. The backlash against building has gotten so ridiculous that we are
creating our own problems. IMHO Tahoe would be better served by higher density
development than the sprawl we have now

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twobyfour
Of course, this is happening everywhere the rental market is tight and tourism
high, including large coastal cities.

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_delirium
Large cities do have prices impacted, but because of the larger existing
population it takes a lot more to completely push out residents. They still
operate as cities, with people living and working there year-round, businesses
that don't exclusively cater to tourists, etc. Regardless of how many New
Yorkers complain about tourists, New York as a functioning city with residents
is not on the verge of disappearing. Smaller tourist-heavy towns really are
being almost completely replaced with seasonal rentals in some cases though,
to such an extent that the town more or less ceases to exist as a functioning
town, and turns more into a seasonal amusement park.

In addition to mountain towns in the U.S., you see this in a lot of smaller
European towns and cities, where especially in quaint historic areas nobody
actually lives there anymore. Again usually below a certain size. Despite the
AirBnBs, Paris is still a real city, but Venice is pretty much on life support
(the old town has lost 70% of its population over the past few decades).
Although AirBnB is only one factor in all of this. With Venice it started with
mass conversion to regular B&Bs, and in some areas it's more just traditional
purchase/rental of vacation homes (Londoners buying up 2nd homes in Cornwall
is what's pushed locals out of towns like St. Ives).

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m_mueller
Yes exactly. As an example in Switzerland the phenomenon predates the BnB boom
by at least two decades. It has lead to a new law that tries to limit the 2nd
home ratio for each town - not sure how successful this is though.

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MrMorden
If the amount of second homes and STRs is causing a problem, it's perfectly
reasonable for the government to tax them. As an example, UK councils are
allowed to charge 50% more tax on homes that have been empty for more than two
years (100% and one year in Scotland); if 19% of the town's rental stock has
been converted to STR, that's a sizable revenue stream for rent subsidies and
other programs.

That said, the only way to guarantee affordable housing is to build more
housing.

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_delirium
Unfortunately the 50% "empty homes premium" excludes furnished properties,
which means in practice almost all STR and 2nd-home properties escape it, so
it doesn't really benefit councils like Cornwall that have a large proportion
of such properties. The requirements are "unoccupied and unfurnished for 2
years or more" [1].

It seems more effective as an anti-blight law than anything else, encouraging
people who have completely empty and unused property to sell it to someone who
will do something with it. It's also supposed to target pure investment
properties that people haven't even bothered to furnish, like those said to be
owned by Russian oligarchs in London. Although I wonder if it will be
effective there, since an investor can simply hire a company to throw some
IKEA furniture in the apartment.

I'm not entirely sure if those were the goals, or if it started out life as a
stronger proposal that ended up watered down. As is it's a bit confusing,
since it seems to have a pretty narrow range of application that's easy to
dodge.

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/council-tax-
empty...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/council-tax-empty-homes-
premium)

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MrMorden
Council tax increases also wouldn't have much of an effect on empty properties
in central London because of the band system; tax on a property in Kensington
would max out at £2124.04 before surcharges, or 0.02% on a £10M house. The
property tax on a comparable house in Manhattan (based on checking MLS records
for listings in Chelsea and picking a $13M townhouse) would be $44 000/year.

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visarga
Any title that ends in? -> The correct answer is No.

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seany
No.

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pitaj
Nope.

