this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Everyone who says "ban them" seems like they have never left the US. In Europe and Latin America, there are a ton of other websites that locals use for the same thing. Before the web, you would call up a few places listed in a guidebook and rent it over the phone.
I dislike Airbnb because it's expensive. The concept of "renting a room" in a vacation area will never go away. But the idea of $100 cleaning fees, when they just change the sheets and wipe down surfaces (30 minutes total) is dumb.
We're no strangers to it in the US as well, but what AirBnB has allowed is an industry of landlords that have strangled the housing stock in a number of places. It's not the people renting a room in their house that are the issue, it's the people buying apartments and houses specifically as rental property. I remember seeing a photo of LA that had AirBnB properties marked, and it was estimated at around 45% of all housing as being short-term-only rentals.
I live in a condo complex of duplexes in a summer vacation spot that has a limit on the number of units that can be rented out specifically to avoid this kind of problem - they want affordable housing for people who are actually living here, and not properties that are going to sit empty 8 months of the year. They don't care if you rent out a single room or something, but we have a lady who owns a building who doesn't even live in the same state. She has to drive like 4 hours to get here.
LA is definitely not 45% short term rentals. There are 13 million people living in LA. Where do you think they're all staying?