Airbnb Lawsuit in NYC

Airbnb is suing New York City over short-term rental rules. The outcome could disrupt your next vacation in cities across the US. (msn.com)

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Thank you for sharing this.

Here’s a link to Airbnb’s lawsuit. [You need a free Dropbox account to access.]

Here’s a link to a New York Times article on this.

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If Airbnb had taken responsibility in the first place, closing the accounts of the scammer bait and switch hosts and the illegal sublets and the ones without licenses, it might not have come to this.

I’m sure there are lots of fire trap and other safety violations, too.

And of course there’s the very valid issue of taking affordable housing off the market for locals.

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I think the idea that Airbnb or short-term rentals are responsible for the dearth of rentals has gotten way overblown. What I would like to see discussed in conjunction with that topic are some of the other causes and changes that should be considered to make it so that it’s financially more attractive to do long-term rentals. Everything I’ve ever heard from long-term landlords is the challenges of getting rid of, or evicting, bad tenants. On top of that we had a special circumstance (Covid) that drove people to rent more STR’s and now that many are sitting empty, I believe some of those that jumped in will jump back out. The opportunity flows where the money goes and right now it seems there’s just not enough money to make a long-term rental worth more than a short-term.

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For sure many hosts moved from long term rentals to short term because of issues with tenants and the difficulty of evicting them. Landlord/tenant acts in many places give bad tenants more power than they deserve.

But I can tell you for sure that strs remove affordable housing from the market for locals. It certainly did in my town. It used to be possible to find a decent place to live here long term, now people who serve the tourist industry here have to live in outlying towns and commute every day.

The reason I bought a lot and built a house here is because I could no longer find an affordable place to rent. But most renters aren’t in a financial position to do that.

They aren’t going to bring in str regs here, because the town’s primary industry is tourism and even if there was a lot of noise from locals about it, the govt. is corrupt and could be paid off to look the other way by well-off vacation home owners.

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