7 ms·

No, the difficulty of increasing supply has directly led to increased home prices.

• dorchadas 5y ago
  And if it wasn't for people turning that supply into AirBnBs to satisfy their short term greed and tourists, there wouldn't be as much of an issue. AirBnB has certainly contributed a lot to the lack of supply in major tourist destinations.
  • stickfigure 5y ago
    Tourists are people too. This really seems like an extreme version of nativism.
    • eropple 5y ago
      Respectfully: if you're going to attempt to co-opt a political framing to which you are less than familiar, drawing a transparent parallel between the fundamentally consumerist nature of tourism and needing a place to live that lets you get to your job, and then attempting to tag it as nativism--let alone an "extreme version" of it!--is probably not the least disingenuous way to do so. You are describing something functionally on the same scale as to the "extreme blowback" rich people get when people make fun of them on Twitter for, say, burning untold amounts of dead dinosaur goop to make an NFT or to not quite go to space as a personal stunt. It is somehow, however, though not the "economically just circumstances" of the hand-to-mouth mom. Which is a situation to which I will confess some confusion, but whatever.
    • sudosysgen 5y ago
      The social consequences to a tourist going to a hotel instead of an Airbnb are nowhere even near the social consequences of an even modest increase in rents.
    • lgessler 5y ago
      Is it really right to equate a tourist's interest in accommodation with a resident's interest in a strong community?
      • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        Or a person's interest to have the means to be a part of production without spending their entire life commuting? I'm sorry - I don't think we should build a million skyscrapers in Kethum, Idaho and Jackson Hole, Wyoming so that tourists can enjoy it more cheaply. I do think we should build more housing in major cities.
      • closeparen 5y ago
        I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “strong community” here, but that is a phrase often invoked for nativist and exclusionary impulses which I would rate as quite a bit less legitimate than a desire to see the world.
      • visarga 5y ago
        Yeah, like, residents never travel. Tourists come from Mars. /s Why ban just AirBnB and not Waze for bringing unwanted traffic in previously quiet neighborhoods?
      • kelnos 5y ago
        Where's the threshold of badness here, though? Sure, if 75% of residential units are up for short term rental, it's gonna be really hard for the remaining residents to form a strong community. But if it's more like 5%, or even 10%[0], is that really a big detriment to a "strong community"? That just seems like an easy "no" to me. [0] And I would expect those units to not be evenly distributed around a city; there will probably be higher concentrations in the more touristy spots where this community stuff matters less, and lower concentrations in the more "sleepy" residential areas.
    • BurningFrog 5y ago
      There are also plenty of non tourists who can't find regular housing who cram themselves into AirBnbs. It's better than sleeping in your car.
      • tetromino_ 5y ago
        When I moved to New York for a job, I spent over a month in an Airbnb while searching for more permanent accomodations. My roommates in the Airbnb were all in a similar situations, needing a place to stay for 1-6 months. Without the Airbnb, where would we have gone? A hotel? But a hotel with a useable kitchen and good wifi would have been too expensive for any of us renting one of those rooms.
        • cool_dude85 5y ago
          Historically, there was a type of lodging that seems almost perfectly suited to this situation: a boarding house. At least in my southern US city, the last of the ones here were legislated out of existence in the 80s and 90s as part of the war on drugs.
          • BurningFrog 5y ago
            It's a pretty amazing pattern: 1. Poor people are living in crappy conditions in boarding houses. 2. We solve this problem by banning boarding houses. 3. Now poor people are living in the streets. 4. ...and we're OK with this! Best I can tell, it's because now there is now no landlord profiting on the poor!! There are plenty of similar examples.
          • lupire 5y ago
            They are called apodments now.
        • kelnos 5y ago
          Not sure if NY has this, but when I first moved to the bay area in 2004, I lived for three months in a studio apartment, in a building that catered to shorter-term stays, before finding something more permanent (I was on a 3-month contract and wasn't sure I'd be offered a full-time position). Chatting with the property managers, I learned that my use case was pretty common, as well as people only intending to stay in the area for a few months, as well as your use case of needing some time in the area before finding something more permanent. If we'd had Airbnb back then, it would have almost certainly cost 2-3x what this place cost.
    • acituan 5y ago
      Only if you ignore the difference between immigration and tourism. A tourist is fundamentally there for temporary and consumptive reasons. They don't have any long term interests about the place they visit. They are accommodated as guests. As such, it is only rational that they don't receive the exact same consideration as the residents who have their skin-in-the-game of that same place.
    • mrRandomGuy 5y ago
      No one said they aren't. Some people just don't want their next door neighbor renting out their home/apartment to a bunch of tourists who don't care about how disruptive they are to the people who actually _live_ there.
    • forz877 5y ago
      Tourism isn't always good. Places get trashed, many "tourist" destinations are starting to regulate because people come in, trash the place, and don't give a fuck and leave. It's sad
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I live in San Francisco, so I know my view of crazy housing markets is skewed, but I guarantee you that housing would be just as expensive here if Airbnb didn't exist. And let's not assume that anyone who wants to list a property on Airbnb is mainly motivated by greed. Attempting to paint the people on the other side of your argument as evil is a pretty transparently bad argumentation strategy.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• trident5000 5y ago
  Theres no supply because investors are hoarding them. Blackrock is buying out entire neighborhoods and thats really the tip of the iceberg compared to airbnb listings.
  • lghh 5y ago
    Why can’t we create enough supply that it’s not worth investors hoarding?
    • trident5000 5y ago
      Because theres not enough land and investors have more money than you. As an investment the average american will always be priced out. Its priced to hit your maximum threshold on monthly wages expendable to rent with minimal savings.
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        Because theres not enough land There actually is enough land if you look outward from major cities, but billionaire investors already own that, too.
      • bullfightonmars 5y ago
        Most cities have plenty of land but it is zoned exlusively for low density single family houses.
    • eropple 5y ago
      Because space in desirable areas is finite? Because the creation of that proximate supply does reduce the desirability of those areas, not merely in terms of the upper class but the middle and--eventually, given a far enough point on the curve--the lower classes too? Because ruining things for everyone because of the investor class is antithetical to a humane society? (Which is to say that there is absolutely an argument for increased supply, but rather that the interests of the REIT-helming class are not congruent with the interests of the people who live there, and thus can either come congruent or be ignored.)
• wpietri 5y ago
  Supply increase difficulty has not changed recently. Demand increase has. So if we're going to blame it on one factor, it makes sense to pick the one that has changed and is easier to control. Less friction in increasing supply is also not an unalloyed good. You can look at the commercial office market, which is much less restricted and has huge boom/bust cycles. And that's before we get to the externalities of rapid housing growth. I'm actually for increased supply, but I'd rather we stuck with better arguments for it than helping Airbnb get off the hook for the reasonably forseeable consequences of their actions.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    > Supply increase difficulty has not changed recently Sure, but supply keeps increasing less than demand is increasing, accumulating the housing shortage each year. This is a decades old trend, from long before AirBnb. I think that supply increase is vastly dominated by regular old population increase in cities that refuse to build housing. I'd need a lot of convincing to believe AirBnb is more than a minor factor.
    • wpietri 5y ago
      Yes, and I said, I'm for supply increase for exactly that reason. But it's a complicated problem, and AirBnB's unarguable supply decrease can only make it worse.
  • amadeuspagel 5y ago
    > You can look at the commercial office market, which is much less restricted and has huge boom/bust cycles. This is a problem only for investors. Dealing with that is their job. Protecting them from it is not a good reason to restrict housing supply.
    • wpietri 5y ago
      It's not just a problem for investors. It's also a problem for cities, as boom-bust cycles can drastically misallocate resources.
  • deleted 5y ago
• andrepd 5y ago
  This is a mantra often repeated on hn when anythig related to housing comes up, but is it true? Many cities around the world have experienced the airbnb effect or similar: demand from tourists which can pay better means higher demand and lower supply as houses are converted into tourism accommodation. This is also also the mechanism of gentrification in general, so it's not just tourism.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Most AirBNBs - like most rentals - in desirable places are actually heavily cash-flow negative. This only works because you can count on the Fed constantly lowering interest rates and pumping up your investment on 5:1 leverage.
    • sudosysgen 5y ago
      Nominally cash flow negative doesn't mean shit. For starters many people own the property outright, making it cash flow positive, and beyond that what matters is your change of equity. If you start with 50 000$ then loan against 30 000$ of that, but your equity increases by 70 000$ as you make payments, and then sell the house at the same price, you're still up 40 000$, even though your cash flow was -30 000$.
      • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        A cash-flow negative house that doesn't appreciate and become ever more cash-flow negative is a TERRIBLE investment compared to the S&P 500. In the simplest terms, take a $100k house. 20% down = $20k downpayment + $3k closing costs. Generally, this is a house that would rent for at least $800/m. Your payment is $337/m. Of that, only $143 is principal. If the house is even 5% cash-flow negative - that means you're only getting ~$100/m in principal. You'd get ~$145 on your $23k downpayment in the S&P 500. And instead of being cash-flow negative and taking money OUT of your investments, you could instead ADD to it. Add to that the fact that you'll pay an additional ~6%+ transaction costs at closing -> And even a 5% cash-flow negative house with 0% appreciation is likely to come out negative. This only works because the Fed pretty much guarantees that house prices will appreciate >3% per year for the last 20 years. 3%*5:1 leverage => Crushes the S&P 500 average. Even if you're 10% cash-flow negative, it usually beats the S&P. Add to that the fact that $250k of the capital gains are tax free -> And that pretty much eliminates the 10% transaction fee and makes it better tax-wise than the S&P 500.