This highlights a flaw in the law more than anything else. Who owns your home? If government can tell you who can stay with you, regardless of any private transactions or agreements you make with that person, then government has more authority over your living space than you do.
Who owns your home? If government can tell you who can stay with you
The government can do all manner of proscriptions for your residence. For instance, no, you cannot run a brothel from your house. You cannot turn it into a bouncy house park. And you cannot have short-term rentals in an area that the community has decided to use for permanent housing.
It's called "zoning", and collectively we've agreed to the allowed uses of our property. You live in a community of others, and your property lines do not define "The Independent Republic of JJordan", so yeah, the government does have some authority over your use of your property. You might not like it, but you'll be going against the flow. Because, personally, I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.
You also don't get to just decide not to follow the rules after the fact. One moved to a community, and directly or indirectly agreed to abide by the community standards. If one decides that's just not really working for them anymore, well, move to a community that has standards more to your liking. There do exist places that will have no problem with you throwing all the loud parties you like, and renting to college students on spring break. Those places are not in SV, however, so good luck in your search for remote work.
Isn't "zoning" the primary reason why NYC real estate is so expensive in the first place? Controls that restrict the supply of housing is probably not a good thing if you're looking to make NYC real estate more affordable.
Actually it's mostly because NYC is a very very popular place to live. It's also because a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment. Removing zoning laws will not change these things.
> a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment
That would be OK, but renting for short term should be illegal? If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them. If owners don't pay their due taxes, call IRS on them. It's no reason to make it illegal to rent for short term.
I have used AirBnb in many cities on 4 continents and was always respectful to the locals and even tried my best to follow the specific recycling rules and such.
What I enjoy the most is the organic feeling of being in a real apartment vs being in a hotel room. Hotel rooms all feel the same, wherever you go. What I want is to experience the same perspective as a local, well, at least to attempt to do that, and that is because I appreciate the different cultures.
Banning short term apartment rentals would send a bad message to people who just want to appreciate your culture.
> If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them.
And what happens when that leads to calling the cops every weekend, for a different group of people?
I'll tolerate my neighbour having a loud party on his 25th birthday, or him accidentally banging his suitcase down the stairs at 5.30 when he's catching an early flight. I'll do the same, equally infrequently.
It's simply not fair to have that behaviour every fucking weekend, which was what happened when an apartment in the building was put on AirBnB.
Fortunately, the listing was removed the day after I sent it to the landlord, and the noise has stopped. I highly doubt any tax was paid on the income, which is also wrong.
Maybe AirBnb should allow neighbors to comment on disturbing behavior by tourists. Responsibility and consequences could follow a tourist wherever s/he goes.
Calling the cops on a noisy neighbor in NYC is pointless unless that neighbor is a business. The cops may pay a visit, but it the person starts making noise again, they can, they will, and the cops will not force the issue. They'll say that's for the landlord/condo association/coop board to sort out. Dealing with those entities can sometimes be extremely difficult, and can take a long time to sort out. A landlord can't evict someone without really good cause, and even then it can take a long time, during which the tenant can keep renting out over and over.
People don't want transients living in their apartment buildings for safety and other reasons. Unlike hotels in NYC, we lack the necessary security and also lacking is stringent check-in procedures that hotels have. We have doormen but they are not security guards.
It is true that NYC is a popular place to live, but the higher apartment costs are caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. These are "economic rents" -- a market failure that creates inefficient markets through use of politics by special interests -- in this case landlords that want to extract higher rents from tenants.
In general this is true (and certainly given that many HN readers live in the Bay area, it probably falls within people's personal experience), but NYC is not a great example. Parts of NYC have some degree of density restriction, but much of it (pretty much all of Manhattan, say) is among the highest-density residential areas in the US, and still very expensive, because even given all the density, there's a finite amount of land, which still means supply is constrained as compared to demand. Even given no density restrictions at all, some places would still be very expensive. Tokyo is another good example of this.
Yeah, the buildings aren't very tall, but people are in them right now.
Before you can build a newer, bigger building, you first need to buy a large enough contiguous area from potentially several owners who don't particularly want to move. That adds friction and years of extra work to any new building, which will discourage new construction, lower supply and raise prices regardless of the zoning.
Unless you're proposing that the government begin seizing tracts of land in Manhattan on behalf of high-rise developers?
I don't think this is as much of a problem as you are making it out to be. If the east village, which is currently mostly zoned R8B[1] were tomorrow to be substantially upzoned (to say R10) you'd see lots of new construction within a year. There'd be so much money to be made that deals would happen.
That's part of it. Another major part of it is that there are major zoning restrictions. Excessive zoning laws pushes up price. This has been demonstrated time and time again.
This is a fair point. My original comment should have been more specific: cities with above average zoning restrictions consistently see higher housing costs. A corollary of which is that excessive zoning also leads to higher costs, unless your position is there is no city with excessive zoning.
Isn't "zoning" the primary reason why NYC real estate is so expensive in the first place?
More directly, it's one of the reasons NYC real estate is so valuable in the first place. The way the city has managed density (and parks, open space, and its waterfront) has in general worked out pretty well, over the years. Which has helped the city thrive in ways that its direct competitors (such as Boston and Baltimore) have not.
You are correct that zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status create political scarcity of housing that benefits landlords such as Donald Trump to the detriment of renters. The landlords and allied special interests back laws that create "economic rents" -- additional profits not through wealth creation and efficient markets but through the market failure of creating artificial scarcity.
If AirBnb wants to make housing more affordable in NYC, they should lobby to remove these zoning laws that benefit wealthy landlords such as Donald Trump.
> short-term rentals in an area that the community has decided to use for permanent housing
It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out. We're not talking about someone running a business out of their home, where the zoning laws actually apply.
> I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.
How about the ones who let that druggie sister down on her luck move in, she's ok because it's for over 30 days?
This is just whiny bullcrap from someone who wants to be able to control their neighbors.
> You also don't get to just decide not to follow the rules after the fact. One moved to a community, and directly or indirectly agreed to abide by the community standards.
We're not discussing a housing authority here. If you and your neighbors get together and decide the community cannot abide someone allowing another person to use their house for less than ... what 6 months? a year ... you write that into the bylaws, set out the financial penalty, and then you enforce it.
And that's your right.
But when these kinds of things become illegal across an entire state, there's a problem. This law should have never been on the books in its current form to begin with.
> It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out. We're not talking about someone running a business out of their home, where the zoning laws actually apply.
By that definition so are long-term rentals, or even home buying and selling. A Colorado court has ruled that there's no substantive difference between a renter who rents for one month or one week.
Subletting is not short term, and is rightly considered to be largely governed by the same laws as those that apply to rentals since the uses are so similar.
I honestly do not understand the willful ignorance in this thread. Short term rentals is commerce. Everyone knows it's commerce. When you say you think it isn't (or you don't understand how it could be) you sound like you're denying the earth goes around the sun. This isn't even a particularly nuanced area of permitted use laws (zoning) or the appropriate role of government. You are all basically advocating for elimination of all zoning and/or pretending it doesn't exist as a totally normal type of regulation in the US (and all over the world).
Of course they shut down lemonade stands. Especially if you tried to run a daily lemonade stand out of your front yard, staffed by people who don't live there.
They're legal because the government has not decided to make them illegal. If the government decides that your lemonade stand is a danger to public health, or that your stamp collection is a national patrimony and cannot leave the country, it will make new laws that enforce those decisions.
It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out.
That's not what relevant the laws say ("You can't rent your property, period!"). Just that you can't use a residential property as a de-facto hotel.
If you and your neighbors get together and decide the community cannot abide someone allowing another person to use their house for less than ... what 6 months?
30 days. The point is that short-term rentals have a very different character (in terms of impact on neighbors, and impact on property values) than long-term rentals.
This is just whiny bullcrap from someone who wants to be able to control their neighbors.
No, it's just life the big city. Though I agree that whether these issues should be of interest of the state (as opposed to municipalities) is very much open to question. Then again, the Empire State is known to be messed up (and to have lopsided control over) a great many things, in this regard.
It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out
Your right to do as you please with your property ends where my property, and interference with my enjoyment of it, begins.
Or do you also think that if you buy some property straddling a river, you can dump waste into it and say "my property, nobody can tell me what to do with it" while making everyone downriver pay for the cleanup of what you did? Because that's the ultimate moral grounding of laws restricting property -- you don't own an isolated island in the middle of nowhere, you own property that's adjacent to and can affect other pieces of property owned by other people who also have rights.
> Or do you also think that if you buy some property straddling a river, you can dump waste into it and say "my property, nobody can tell me what to do with it" while making everyone downriver pay for the cleanup of what you did?
You can't actually own the land around a river, but I get the point you're trying to make regardless.
The point is, if they're causing a ruckus, report them and have it shut down. If they're not, leave it alone. And having multiple different vehicles in the driveway isn't causing a ruckus.
This is basically FUD. What if they do something the neighbors don't like!?! Then deal with it at that time, stop being thought police.
> It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out.
I mean, a majority of our forebears thought it should. The original law was passed by a representative democracy. And so was this one. You're one of the (totally guessing) 48% of people that disagree. That's democracy. You have to live with getting out-voted.
If the "fast-paced, innovative future" includes petulant children stomping around mad because the big, bad government won't let them do whatever they want no matter the consequences to those around them, I'd say governments are more relevant than ever.
We've already asked you to comment civilly and substantively, so we're banning this account. We're glad to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe that you won't do this any more.
Historically, either the government wins or the petulant children win and then become the power center that directs government that the next set of petulant children complain about.
Either way, governments are part of the future. There no real reason to expect this iteration to work any differently than all the others since humans gathered in structured societies.
Its not the government imposing these restrictions, its your neighbors. If there were no government for them to impose them through, they'd use other institutions, or else just the threat of violence. You can imagine a government-free future all you want, but you're talking about a non-collectivist future, which is absurd.
What exactly would that future look like? Where there is no government, one will appear. People seem to have this incurable efficiency whereby we create rules, regulations, and eventually bureaucracies. Rules, implicit and explicit, manifest whether you like it or not. Authority manifests.
I doubt the poster above is against rules, but like me wants to decentralize that authority and enforcement. My answer: you want to have a market for law and enforcement. Read "the machinery of freedom" by David Friedman if interested.
> Because, personally, I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.
Why do you believe that guests wont give "two shits" about the community. This sounds incredibly xenophobic to me.
Do you perceive that your sarcasm was effective? Did it convey your point clearly and concisely, so that you can share your perspective and point of view?
Or did it do more harm to what is otherwise a legitimate viewpoint and possibly deserving of discussion?
I'm btw sure that many Socialists would actually agree that the statement undoubtably displayed hatred and xenophobia. He did argue against allowing people from the outside to come and live in his community because he by default perceives foreigners as not giving "two shits" about the community. This is obviously not true, you can't just declare that all foreigners want to harm your community.
OK, I would encourage you to reread the conversation. The HN consensus is clearly different than how you perceive it.
You may be absolutely correct. The HN Hivemind is frequently wrong.
But please use this as an opportunity for introspection, wherein you centralize the idea that the community of peers with whom you choose to associate, think you are an ass.
This argument doesn't hold much water. There's many, many things you can't do in or with your own home due to various laws. There are externalities associated with lots of activities, and therefore these activities are regulated or outlawed. I can't use my home as a bar, or as a concert venue. I can't use it to tan leather, or operate a waste incinerator.
But you can let your druggie sibling live there for free. There's a reason why zoning laws exist, there's no good reason to disallow someone from doing what's effectively subleasing. It's been legal since forever.
If you want to have visitors over when you live in your house you're free to do so.
If you own a property and operate it as a hotel while not actually living in it you're violating the zoning laws that every business/hotel operation have to adhere to.
AirBnB's use of the word "sharing" is laughably liberal. By their standard if I'm running a convenience store I'm "sharing" my property with every customer who wanders in.
> If government can tell you who can stay with you, regardless of any private transactions or agreements you make with that person, then government has more authority over your living space than you do.
Fire marshals have limited the amount of people you can have in a particular building for more than a hundred years.
I don't know the rationale in this case, but there are very good rationales for government to have more control of your house than you do in some instances. Mandatory fire suppression systems can end up saving not just your apt unit, but your whole neighborhood.
Is it a flaw or a feature? This might be more akin to the local government saying that you can't run a business in a residential area (i.e. zoning laws) than it is to squashing "private transactions or agreements".
That's part of the deal with living in an urban area. Living in such close quarters, you can easily disrupt the lives of those around you - that's why we have noise complaints, rules around trash disposal, etc. etc.
If you don't want to live by those community rules then it would best to live outside of a community.
You own your home. Government also has a duty to the well being of the people living around you. Zone laws prevent you from using your home to manufacture chemicals. Noise law prevents you from running musical concert day and night. You would expect your neighbors to obey the same laws to enjoy your peace and quiet at home.
It's called "zoning" and it's been around for quite a while. You know, those pesky laws that says someone can't just build, say, a giant slag heap directly behind (and towering above) your house with nothing but rusty wire holding it together.
Which laws (a.k.a. zoning laws) you unequivocally agree to abide by when buying a piece of property, in just about any jurisdiction on the planet.
If you live in the US (where NYC is), you can also tell the government who can stay with you per the third amendment. Therefore, they don't have more authority than you, just different authority.
It's probably good that they do. I may not agree with this particular exercise of authority, but I'd like to be able to do something about it if my neighbor decides to build bombs in his spare room.
It's not exactly who but if, per the third amendment.
Also, I don't see how your point about neighbors is relevant to it. Is it a serious risk where you live? A common occurence, would you say? And how exactly, in constitutional sense, would you be able to do anything about it?
If implies who, as it gives negotiating leverage. But that's kind of beside the point.
Edit: I just realized I probably misunderstood you. The point about neighbors is meant to be relevant to the notion of the government having a degree of control over your property in general, not the specific question of who's allowed to stay there. Most of my response is no longer relevant with that clarification, so I've removed it.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man... To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it.
What is ownership without a government? Who issues and authenticates the deeds? What do private police do when someone calls them and asks them to remove you from "your" property.
The housing in NYC is mostly apartments. People don't want transients in their apartment buildings. We value our safety. It is really that simple. People absolutely do not have the right to make an unsafe environment for others in the apartment building.
That's a poor description of what is going on here. I suppose you'd argue that having to pay a property tax is the same as paying the government rent, and so that means one doesn't "own" his home at all as long as it's taxed?
Where does that argument end? At what point can we just call it what it is: advocacy for disbanding government entirely?
Great point; property taxes are remarkably similar to rent, are they not? Pay your annual dues or you're out on your ass, so to speak.
Consumption taxes are a much fairer way of funding the government, IMO. Rich people consume more and pay more in taxes. Those with less consume less and pay less.
As long as property tax exists (your county will seize your home if you don't pay it) the concept of real estate ownership is pretty tenuous. I accept taxation in general but property taxes have always rubbed me the wrong way.
There's a movement that sees things exactly the other way, based on the ideas of Henry George: maintaining that only real property taxation is legitimate (or appropriate) and that other kinds of taxes aren't!
Property tax is pretty essential. Huge weird distortions can happen in low property tax places. California with prop 13, the UK with it's non-existent property taxes, Vancouver, BC with it's very low property tax rates are all examples of RE gone wrong and are places with low property tax.
The problem in California is the grandfathering in of rates, rather than the fact that the tax exists. If property tax was completely removed and the state made up the shortfall in some other tax (hopefully progressive) then there'd be no market distortion.
Yeah it's not the rate, it's the %2 increase rate. Takes 35 years for the tax to double in cost. Seattle's King County has a lower property tax rate than a chunk of the bay area for example.
Well, do you not own your home if an association can force you not to paint an icon on your roof or put certain statues in your yard? I would say so. I have always seen homeowners associations as a grevious affront to the First Amendment. But apparently I am missing something vital or I am insane.
* I have always seen homeowners associations as a grevious affront to the First Amendment. But apparently I am missing something vital or I am insane.*
The 1st refers to the government, not to housing communities to which you willingly moved. Don't like HOAs? Don't live in an HOA community. The government has no hand in this.
> Don't like HOAs? Don't live in an HOA community.
That's becoming harder and harder. Currently 68 million Americans live in some sort of community association [1] and that's constantly rising.
These are essentially hyper-local governments. I can "willingly move" between cities and states and yet city and state governments also can not infringe upon constitutional rights (though they certainly sometimes try).
It doesn't seem like a big stretch to hold HOAs to the same standard when you're talking about putting restrictions on something as fundamental as someone's residence. That isn't to say they aren't allowed to make any rules governing the community.
Some cities/states are effectively or actually forcing all new development to include a HOA as part of the developer opening up that tract of land, under the auspices of reducing the cost of maintenance by foisting that upon the HOA/community directly.
Like the fact that the HOA can lien your house for as little as $100 in dues.
And can then sell your house out from under you.
If you're _really_ unlucky, they'll sell it to a landlord who sits on the board of the HOA, and the board of the HOA will accept the sale for less than half of the market price, with the landlord buying the house being one of the deciding votes...
You are missing something vital. The First Amendment guarantees that the government cannot restrict speech, free association, etc. Homeowners associations are not the government. They are private organizations. You generally agree to follow their rules as part of the contract you sign when purchasing the property.
But why do you have to sign that contract? Why does this private organization have the power to force you to sign a contract before purchasing property? Because the munucipal government has granted them that power.
The way the bill of rights is applied to municipal governments isn't clear, but in my opinion this is an overreach.
Homeowners associations aren't the government, you technically agree to join them when you buy the house. It's "free exchange of goods and services" - quotes to indicate that it really isn't but in the government's eyes it's fine. Social coercion is a powerful force, the same that produces many odd laws.
