Eliminate zoning and other regulations that make it impossible to build sufficient housing supply.
At it’s core, this is the root cause of the housing crisis. We do not have enough supply. The amount of Airbnb’s that exist is extremely miniscule and the targeting of Airbnbs is an intentional distraction tactic.
Depending on the source, 1% to 0.2% of all dwellings are listed for short-term rental in the US. That’s crazy small and has very little impact on housing prices overall.
The fact of the matter is that Single Family Homes are an incredible luxury that our parents and grandparents were able to enjoy when the country had half as many people as it does now. It is no longer sustainable to expect a SFH in the US, and the American public continuing to cling to that dream and restrictive zoning practices are really what is driving up prices.
If you want an affordable house you will need to move to a rural area where land and labor are cheap. If you want to live near any reasonably sized city, you better be upper middle class to even think about buying a SFH.
…Or actually enforce zoning and regulations that ban short term rentals in residential areas? Most Air B&B’s in America are already illegal, real estate interests just have a ton of sway in local governments.
Why would you want to ban short term rentals when you could instead build more housing supply? Short term rentals bring in tons of money not only to property owners, but to the local area at large. Housing isn’t a zero sum game where in order to have short term rentals, long term rental supply must go down. Zoning laws make it impossible to build high density housing and approvals for large building projects are subject to the whims of the local planning board or city council rather than concrete laws and requirements. If we were to fix zoning regulations and improve approval processes, you could have plenty of housing supply for both short term rentals and long term, and the community would be better off.
Enforce zoning regulations and apply rental laws or hotel regulations to Air BnBs. If you make them actually follow the rules, it suddenly becomes vastly less profitable.
Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it’s so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they’re non-specific about the unit you get, so it’s very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.
Like any business, they should be subject to audit and inspection at any time.
