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Update update update:
We’re forming a dues -paying host centric lobbying group for NYC hosts, since Airbnb has definitely not supported us. (They recently asked hosts to go to Albany, then once they got there revealed a plan to the state reps that actually screwed hosts a bit, and without any warning to the hosts. So glad I didn’t go, despite the personal phone call and rhetoric)
But I’m still de-listed and I do not know when that will change.
We have a complicated system in NYC.
One can have a legal one family house (me, for instance) but because it is over 70 years old, it doesn’t have a Certificate of Occupancy. Its hallways are not (necessarily) a legal width, the staircase is probably not up to code. Safe and stable, yes, but in the last 70 years the city has changed what the minimum rise height and step length must be.
This is fine, because no neighbor has complained that I’m doing anything illegal (doing renovations to the stairs without a permit, for instance).
But as soon as a neighbor (Or a hotel lobbyist) calls the department of buildings and complains, they have to send someone to see for themselves.
Historically, the dob beaurocrat, who wants to be knocking on your door as little as you want them to knock on it, arrives, is not allowed inside, and so marks “not at home” on their paperwork. If they visit twice and are not able to enter the premises, they mark the file closed and you’re left wondering which neighbor hates you.
If you make the naive assumption that it is safe to let the inspector into your home (you had permits, the work was done to code 4 months ago) you will discover the code got changed 3 months ago (this happened to my friend’s father, regarding insulation around the pipes he had just installed), and they will also find all the other non code work. (A friend did a gut renovation of the interior of her new house. The garage, 50 years old of it was a day, was untouched. But the city files said the garage was in the wrong place. Whatever city employee surveyed the street 30 years ago, put the garage a foot to the left. The city said she had to move her 50 year old garage a foot to the left. She only got out of it by having a breakdown in the city office and paying a bunch of “fines”)
What seems to have changed is that instead of writing “not at home” the inspectors are writing “was unable to verify correct insulation depth” … So the dob can claim you don’t have it and treat you accordingly.
I don’t know what the OP’s version of the wrong insulation was, but other people have said they got fined for not having sprinklers. It’s a private home, but the judges in these cases don’t necessarily have an in depth understanding of the law in regards to short term rentals of private homes, nor do they have an incentive to get educated. Cough cough.
Sure, it’s legal for me to host since we’re always on the premises and it’s a less than 3 family home and we don’t serve breakfast and we do pay income taxes on it. But. I probably don’t have minimum width hallways, I’m not handicap accessible, i don’t have sprinklers. I’m not a hotel, but the city and the judge doesn’t care. I’m legal, but I’m probably in violation of a code somewhere.
(One reason owners of old houses don’t bother to get Certificates of Occupancy is without one on file, you are in a vague limbo state where no one seems to care because there is no paperwork to check)
And it’s just easier to pay the fine than stand up, alone, against the city (And hotel industry).
For me, I’ve never made much more than 8k a year, so a 12k fine is daunting. They’ll never say I’m illegal. Just fine me to death.
Ugh.
Recently we’ve faced the irony that we can’t afford to create a legal ( And get all the city permits) basement apartment, because we’ll have to bring Everything up to code if we do. Builders won’t do it. But they’re happy to make you a “legal but no permits” renovation.
Our basement will remain scary until we win the lottery. Yay.
Good luck to you. So fortunate my progresive county quickly set up rational and reasonable rules (and got the jump on the state legislature, which I understand was quite intentional.
Hi @Alia_Gee,
Warning: more off-topic rambling from me - feel free to ignore.
If that’s the case, then the US press is (most of the time) frankly falling down on the job, big time. As documented by people like Chomsky and other media critics. Actually, Herman and Chomsky wrote a whole book, “Manufacturing Consent”, on the subject of media distortions, later adapted into a documentary. And there are other people like Ben Bagdikian who have also had plenty to say on the subject.
The bottom line is that the US press (and probably the press of every other country on the planet) is rarely going to tell you the things you should know, Personally, my view on the press if that if they are not deliberately lying to you, it’s a good day.
And, to be clear, I certainly am not attempting to defend the NYT, which I could not care less about. Though they do have very extensive news coverage, which is useful.
Yes, I’ve heard similar comments over the years myself. Usually from British imperialist apologists. E.g. the Eric Blair I mentioned above.
It’s unclear what would have happened if the Nazis had invaded India and murdered Gandhi and the rest of the Indian Resistance leaders. As always, the devil is in the details. For one thing, it would probably have depended on how exactly it went down. For example, when they did it, exactly. If they had done this post 1939, it could have got very interesting. At that point, Gandhi and his people had been running the resistance for a long time, and he was generally greatly respected. I think that there are lots of Indians who would have been very unhappy if he and his colleagues had been murdered by an invading German force.
And it seems a reasonable corollary that non-violence would fairly speedily been pitched out of the window, in that event. You are presumably aware that Gandhi spent a lot of time and effort trying to keep Indian resistance non-violent. He wasn’t always successful, and during Partition he was unsuccessful at keeping the violence contained.
It’s also important to realise that Gandhi did something very important, and without precedent in Indian history. He made Indians actually think of themselves as part of something called India. This is called nationalism, and is often, correctly in my opinion, considered to be a regressive force. But it’s also a very powerful one. And it could have been a significant one if Hitler had tried something. Actually, Mr Blair wrote an essay on exactly that topic, called “Wells, Hitler and the World State”.
Historically, as everyone knows, Indians were the one keeping Indians in line on behalf of the British. The British could never have done it on their own It’s why the 1857 revolt failed. It was Indians beating in the head of other Indians, on the behalf of the British. According to family legend, one of my great-grandfathers, Sir Suleman Kassum Mitha, was one of them. This was possible because the people doing it didn’t think of themselves as Indians hurting other Indians.
Oh, and the British Imperialist machine was to some extent constrained by the fact that they had a (sort of) social democracy back home, and it might have got a bit sticky if they had had to answer questions about murdering the non-violent Indian Resistance leaders.
Personally, I don’t really have an opinion on whether non-violence was a good or bad thing. Gandhi thought it was. And he was the man on the spot, running the Resistance against the Big Bad British Empire. And I think we can at least say he had an effect. After all, it’s his face on the banknotes of India. All of them. Plus his name on roads in every city in India. And who knows what else.
And this could be how they close down Air in NY and everywhere else…
OK…thanks for the explanation. It kind of makes more sense now.
More off topic ramblings:
Along similar lines in the USA, every city has a Martin Luther King Boulevard. I watched his “I’ve got a dream” speech a few weeks ago on PBS. Tears streamed. He was such a powerful orator and an amazing leader.
From Wikipedia: " Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr., January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi."
Amazing men.
Comparing Martin Luther King, Jr. to Gandhi is insulting to Martin Luther King, Jr. Ghandi was prejudiced against black people (not to mention fiercely misogynistic) .
@EllenN
I didn’t compare MLK to Gandhi. I quoted an article that MLK was inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi.
The similarity was that both men are honored with streets and more named after them.
No one is perfect. Gandi lived 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948. A sad reality is that at the time people of African descent were treated very badly (often inhumanely) and not respected. Thank goodness times are changing. Absolutely not perfect but slowly getting better.
Each in his own way, was inspiring and for me, MLK continues to be. (I don’t know enough about Gandhi but I respect the ideology of change through non-violence).
I’ll make the comparison. There are plenty of criticisms to make of Dr. King and the entire civil rights movement, particularly with regard to their treatment of women. Both Gandhi and King were deeply flawed humans and products of their time. Both made tremendous personal sacrifices to improve the lives of people as best they knew and were giants among men by any measure. We can’t have heroes without iconoclasts I suppose.
King’s flaws didn’t come anywhere near Gandhi’s. King worked for all people to be treated as equals. Gandhi believed that black Africans were inferior to Indians and actively worked against their best interests.
Gandhi was a world class misogynist, views which are still negatively impacting Indian women. King is well known to have been a philanderer, but he believed in equality between the genders.
I disagree. I’ll leave it there.
You disagree with facts?
I certainly agree with you on your assessment of American news media! When I have time, I like to see what Russia Today and Al Jazeera are saying, as they have even less interest in making the US look good than the bbc. (Though I think that relationship is strained at the moment, too. What a time to be alive, eh? … whimper.)
The little history I know of the British raj certainly jives with what you’re saying, so I don’t disagree with that, either. I knew the Brahmins had accepted the British ruling class (I think there had been a Persian ruling class before them, so they were kind of used to it? The machine kept ticking along but the driver changed ) but I hadn’t realized the kshatriya had assimilated so easily… or was it not caste based/ Just humans being crap to each other because they could?
RT has some good reporting. Even though they are (I believe) they are own by the Russian state.
I don’t know the details of whether Indian support for the British was class-based, but as far as I know, they were generally accepted as being a reality and a fact. And encountered little resistance. Till Gandhi came and started stirring things up. A few relevant facts to note:
India had had no democratic history or even national history before it became independent in 1947. So Indians are no real concept of: they are bad foreign people who are oppressing us. (Unlike, say, Finland.) If anything, this kind of thing was the norm. Much of India has been controlled by Muslim invaders for a thousand years before that. Though bad, they were not as bad as the British.
Also, the British had been controlling most of India for a very long time. The Battle of Plassey was in 1857. That’s generally considered to the mark the beginning of British control. They had been there so long that most Indians has no recollection or conception of an alternative.
Indians are generally very philosophical about bad things - it’s a cultural feature.
But British rule was so incompetent abusive it was pushing it. Regular major famines, for example.
A major factor in the push for independence came from educated Indians, who, ironically had been educated (at least partly) in places like the UK. Both Gandhi and Nehru had spent time in the UK. Gandhi had taken the Bar in London. Nehru was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. It’s not entirely clear to what extent the West influenced Gandhi. He’s a very complicated man, whose ideas seem to be been partly obtained from Hinduism. I think there are things he admired about the West, but overall he seems to have had very mixed feelings about it. And certainly seems to have had the number (as they say) of Western Imperialism. And he has very modern and progressive ideas about ecology and environmentalism. Consider for example
The first is the environment. The economic rise of China and India has brought a long suppressed, and quintessentially Gandhian, question to the fore: How much should a person consume? So long as the West had a monopoly on modern lifestyles, the question simply did not arise. But if most Chinese and most Indians come, like most Americans and most Englishmen, to own and drive a car, this will place unbearable burdens on the earth. Back in 1928, Gandhi had warned about the unsustainability, on the global scale, of Western patterns of production and consumption. “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West,” he said. “The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
from Why Gandhi Still Matters.
So, it’s not entirely correct to say that the educated Indian classes were on the side of the British, though many were. My own ancestors seem to have had a comfortable relationship with them. Two of my great-grandfathers were knighted by the British. To be fair, in one case it was apparently for philanthropy.