Detroit Quietly Bans Airbnb (curbed.com) 197
A new zoning ordinance that quietly went into effect this week has residents trying to figure out what comes next for Airbnb's presence in Detroit. Many hosts have received notices that the city has outlawed Airbnb for R1 and R2 zoning. Curbed Detroit reports: The new zoning ordinance apparently went through the Planning Commission and City Council in 2017, and went into effect this week. The text added to the amendment states: "Use of a dwelling to accommodate paid overnight guests is prohibited as a home occupation; notwithstanding this regulation, public accommodations, including bed and breakfast inns outside the R1 and R2 Districts, are permitted as provided in Sec. 61-12-46 of this Code." The vast majority of Airbnb units in Detroit are in R1 and R2 districts. These do not include places like lofts, apartments, or larger developments. Airbnb has issued a statement saying: "We're very disappointed by this turn of events. Airbnb has served as an economic engine for middle class Detroiters, many of whom rely on the supplemental income to stay in their homes. We hope that the city listens to our host community and permits home sharing in these residential zones."
Darn and I wanted to visit Detroit! (Score:5, Funny)
Well there goes the big vacation I had planned for beautiful downtown Detroit..
Re:Darn and I wanted to visit Detroit! (Score:5, Informative)
You might be surprised to learn that lots of Detroit has been coming back strong since like 2010. Neighborhoods that were all but abandoned are showing signs of growth and there are lots of areas that are experiencing a full-scale renaissance.
Back in 2017, I visited there for 10 days to give some lectures and participate in a symposium and I got to see areas of the city where I never would have gone ten years ago. I was surprised at how nice it was and how optimistic many of the people who live there have become. There is a vibrant arts community and people really have a community feeling. Detroit will be back.
Because I love you all, here's a little something for you to groove to while you're pondering the Detroit Renaissance:
https://youtu.be/yotCw66_G1g [youtu.be]
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Back in 2017, I visited there for 10 days to give some lectures and participate in a symposium
I guess you stayed in an AirBnB?
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No, I stayed at some really nice place called the Inn on Ferry, near the Wayne State Art Center. It was kind of expensive, but someone else was paying, so I splurged. They had really good room service. We went to gallery openings and a couple of music shows while we were there.
If I get invited back, I'd go in a second and wouldn't hesitate to stay in an AirBNB.
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I actually was only kidding.
Obviously if you get invited to a conference or a talk they pay for your accommodation.
Re:Darn and I wanted to visit Detroit! (Score:4, Interesting)
Conceived of in 1971 and opened in 1977, the Renaissance Center was heralded as the Renaissance of Detroit. I only bring this up because I find it interesting that you chose the wording "Detroit Renaissance."
Detroit's important symbolically to my region (SE Michigan), and I think that most of us would like to see it "come back," at least as far as the city center is concerned. Realistically, it should probably un-anex most of the communities it absorbed over the last 100 years and concentrate on its strengths.
Right now, "Detroit" as a legal entity kind of drags down the region as a whole, which is unfortunate because we're all "Detroit" (as far as the country is concerned), but we don't exhibit Detroit's problems, as far as the political entity is concerned.
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I don't know. There's a lot of parts of Michigan that are dragging the state down.
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Isn't that where that wine cooler came from ?
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And there goes my vacation and my shopping spree. With AB&B, we could rent a 4 bedroom home for a 7 days, for what it would cost us for two days in a hotel. Some of our savings allows us ot cook our meals, to leave the car parked, and to tour the city via Uber.
I guess the economy is too good, or the hotel industry got their lobby guys to spread some good will around.
This prevents minorities from making an income (Score:2)
Sacre Bleu!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Wherever will I stay when I visit "The Paris of the Midwest"??? Dearborn???
Not so sure about this (Score:4, Interesting)
But isn't Detroit the furthest thing from a competitive housing market? Then again, while a lot of the city is in ruins for all I know the number of actual livable houses might be smaller. Lord knows nobody's going to build there.
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I live in a neighborhood with one house that is full time AirBnB, and the other two have guests intermittently(a lot). I can tell you this. Get ready for your on street parking to turn into a clusterfuck that it wasn't before. Now there is a constantly changing inventory of cars, taking up all the on street parking in my neighborhood because now people want to turn their houses into motels. Imagine if these were full time "guests" or roommates. Then a least it would be the same cars, that usually(becau
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Then allow rentals only in owner-occupied units.
And switch at least partially from property taxes to land value taxes [bloomberg.com] in order to discourage banking of vacant land and end the reverse subsidy [strongtowns.org] of suburban middle-class single-family homes at the expense of poor inner-city residents.
And if you're really concerned about home affordability, allow cities to upzone heavily trafficked residential streets (the
Re:Not so sure about this (Score:5, Insightful)
The exact same thing is true of rent in general. Which isn't an argument for AirBnB, it's an argument against rent in general.
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Aside from areas with limited housing (either limited by space or by short-sighted zoning restrictions), the logical response to investors buying up houses and parking their money in real estate isn't to outlaw rentals. It's to build more homes. That increases the supply of homes, drives down the price of housing, and devalues money investors have parked in real estat
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The implementation details are a long discussion I don’t want have with you (in particular), but I aim for a world where people can make reasonably small monthly payments and deposits comparable to what it costs to rent now, but that money goes to actually owning something some day instead of down a bottomless pit depleting peoples ability to pay for a home they actually own.
As to your second paragraph, economic systems are all about allocating scarce resources. ao saying “except in circumstance
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Yeah, tens of millions of people who where born and raised educated and have all their friends and family and jobs in more-expensive places should just uproot their entire lives and move thousands of miles away. That's a reasonable solution.
Also, all the poor in England should be deported to Russia if they can't afford English homes. That's about a comparable distance and population size between say California and the midwest.
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It's not easy. It is scary and it is risky but sometimes you have to move because the situation becomes untenable.
My father uprooted his life in California with a pregnant wife and two kids and moved hundreds of miles to a place with no friends or family and no prospect for a job.
Sometimes, it's better to risk it all and move than stay hoping it will get better. It's not a solution for everyone but it is a reasonable solution that is available everyone. I don't understand why you would demean it. Free movem
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It's dismissing problems that huge numbers of people face just because there's another really difficult alternative available to them that's the problem.
If we were just talking about one person who lives somewhere they can't afford to live, then them moving somewhere cheaper might be a reasonable choice for them to make, if they choose to make that choice.
But displacing tens of millions of people from their homes is not a solution to widespread housing unaffordability.
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It's dismissing problems that huge numbers of people face just because there's another really difficult alternative available to them that's the problem.
Fair enough.
It is a solution that has been used throughout history and today. It may not be preferable but it does undoubtedly solve the problem those people are facing at that moment. So long as the people make that choice voluntarily and there is no forced relocation, I don't see it as a problem if it's a choice between two bad options.
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But displacing tens of millions of people from their homes is not a solution to widespread housing unaffordability.
It is a solution that has been used throughout history and today. It may not be preferable but it does undoubtedly solve the problem those people are facing at that moment. So long as the people make that choice voluntarily and there is no forced relocation, I don't see it as a problem if it's a choice between two bad options
edit* That's what i get for not previewing.
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the logical response to investors buying up houses and parking their money in real estate isn't to outlaw rentals. It's to build more homes.
Yes. And where do you plan to build those homes? Not where they are buying up houses, because there are already homes there. The answer is in the suburbs, and that's what's leading to our suburban sprawl. And if you do that, you're also building highways and possibly public transportation, energy infrastructure, water and sewer, etc.
The US is appalling at city planning for the most part. We happily develop the farmland outside of cities, build more highways, and create these giant suburban islands, with no
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If you get rid of renting homes, then where do you propose people live if they haven't yet saved up enough for a down payment on a house?
If enough people like that are in the market, then the market will make homes available without a down payment.
Also, many states have loans or even grants available for first-time homebuyers, to cover the down payment.
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If enough people like that are in the market, then the market will make homes available without a down payment.
Thank you, it's heartening that someone else can see this.
If renting our property was not an option, people who own property they're not using (like what they had been renting out) have two options: let it sit there and rot and have wasted their money, or sell it on terms that people who need it to live in (like their former renters) can meet. (Since nobody else is going to be buying it to rent out, since they can't do that, the only buyers will be people who actually want to live there, not other "real est
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If the housing market is competitive then shouldn't the hotel market also be competitive? And if they are both independently competitive, shouldn't they cross-compete for space?
In other words, if there is X marginal demand for 1 more hotel room and Y marginal demand for 1 more apartment to rent, why is it a given that a unit that was an apartment previously must be so forever? And the same for hotel rooms?
Also, investors that are parking their money in real estate aren't leaving them empty, right? They are
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A hotel room may be more profitable, but still something a city wants to discourage. So people can afford to live in the city, say. Ever play Sim City? You need a mix of multiple land-use types.
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. Ever play Sim City
Yea and discovered that aliens will destroy civilization.
THE END IS NIGH!!!!
Blame Quicken! (Score:2)
Blame Quicken Mortgage Loans. They literally own Downtown Detroit.
I bet heavy money that they orchestrated this.
http://www.mlive.com/business/... [mlive.com]
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How does Quicken benefit from a governmental assault on AirBnB?
Genuine question here: (Score:2)
What problem were they trying to solve? I don't get why they would bother to ban something that wasn't a problem... so what problems were being solved here? It just seems like the summary, and also the referenced article is phrased in a one sided way, or perhaps it really is one sided and this is the result of AirBNB refusing to pay a bribe?
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Of course they are collecting taxes.
Or do you want to accuse ever AirBnB host of tax fraud?
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Of course they are collecting taxes.
Or do you want to accuse ever AirBnB host of tax fraud?
Next time you stay in a hotel, check out what percentage of it is "hotel tax". That's the money that the city collects for the privilege of having someone rest their head in your business overnight. In theory, this covers the additional police, fire, and roadway impact of having them in the community. In actuality, it's a cash grab. Most of the police impact of hotel visitors is victimless crime, like drug use or prostitution, and criminalizing those things is itself a cash grab, so it's cash grabs all the
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The typical AirBnB is a person in a to big flat renting out a spare room on occasion.
That has no influence on the market at all.
AirBnB is collecting the hotel tax and transfering it to the city on behalf of the renter ... at least that is how it is dobe in europe.
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The typical AirBnB is a person in a to big flat renting out a spare room on occasion.
That has no influence on the market at all.
If a person were doing it, it would have no influence. When enough people do it, it definitely has an influence. And in fact, it is having an influence.
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It has an influence on the hotels that miss a deal, not on the flat renting market. ...
Rents for flats do not magically increase just because I rent out a room in my 4 rooms flat 20 times a year. If at all empty flats would drop in rent
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The lawn is unkept and full of dandelions, there's a noticeable increase in the amount of garbage as you walk past it (sometimes including needles used for shooting up drugs), the house's paint is dilapidated and peeling off, and there are regularly 4-6 cars staying there which overflow onto the street regularly depriving the 4 houses around it of street parking.
It sounds like you ought to focus on those issues and not the fact that it's a rental. The owner, not the renter, is ultimately responsible for maintaining the property.
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So, exactly what are the neighbors supposed to do about it? They can phone in individual minor complaints to the police or other authorities. That's not going to get them very far. A police officer might show up to a noisy party at 2AM and tell the people to keep it down. The noise will then quiet until, say, 2:05 or 2:10. If the police officer writes tickets, the visitors are likely to tear them up, since they're from out of town, and in any case there will be a new noisy group in the next weekend.
Just buy (Score:5, Funny)
Detroit has 31,000 empty houses. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to buy a house to stay in for a few days and burn it down or something when you're done with it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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While the rent would be dirt cheap, the thousands of dollars of guns, ammunition, body armor, and guard dogs you'd need to survive your stay would offset the savings.
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The prices are coming up:
https://www.trulia.com/for_sal... [trulia.com]
In case you think I'm kidding, when I did a search like that 5 years ago the low end was $100-$200 for a house. People were selling blocks for a grand. At least now they're back to a few thousand.
No surprise here (Score:2)
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Except you are not getting around hotel taxes or vat. ... at least that is how it works in Europe.
AirBnB is keeping that part of the payment and is paying it to the local tax offices
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Lots of places tax AirBnB stays, so that seems unlikely to be the root cause.
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Also, annoyed neighbors call their elected officials and tell them to stop the problem or get kicked out next election. City elected officials are generally pretty close to their constituents, and have to take them seriously. Given an AirBnB house on a block, there's probably several people who will vote against anyone who wants that to continue, and many fewer voting in favor of the house.
Come For The Urban Blight! (Score:2)
Stay for the Heroin!
Who the fuck even wants to visit Detroit? (Score:2)
A good place to get yourself killed.
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Because it is hurting their neighbors and the city.
Renting an appartment on Air BnB removes it from the long term rental pool. This increases housing costs for everyone else, due to lower supply.
Renting an apartment to different people every night brings in additional crime risk and noise levels that their neighbors didn't want to be exposed to. And that's not even counting the number of AirBnB houses used for illegal drug deals and wild parties.
Renting these apartments isn't safe. There's a reason why t
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So what?
A property should be able to do most anything they want with their property, including deriving profit from it as much as possible, that's a reason you OWN property in many cases.
Gentrification drive prices up too....but if you don't allow that, then you never see neighborhoods excel and grow.
You just can't cater to the lowest denominator all the damned t
Re:Who does this help? (Score:4, Interesting)
A property should be able to do most anything they want with their property, including deriving profit from it as much as possible, that's a reason you OWN property in many cases.
So I'll buy the house next to yours and open a disco. I can do "most anything I want", right? During the day, it will be an auto-repair shop, with vehicles pending repair parked in all the on-street parking. If you are in the right state, I'll also operate a dispensary and grow operation.
Zoning laws exist for a reason. Residential is residential, not commercial, for a reason. If you own a house you might appreciate that differentiation.
that's a reason you OWN property in many cases.
That's not the main reason most people own residential property, especially R1 or R2. They own it to live there. That's why it is single and two family zoned. And they want to be able to sell it for a reasonable price when they move away and not have to take a loss because the next door neighbor is operating a business next door.
and there are ALWAYS winners an losers in life.
Some of the "losses" is living in a residential zone and living by residential zoning rules. Although most people would consider it a win considering property values.
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I fail to see how using a property for AirBnB is different than using a property for longer term rentals....what difference does the length of lease matter?
And if you want to get
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I fail to see how using a property for AirBnB is different than using a property for longer term rentals....what difference does the length of lease matter?
Ask any landlord. Transient populations differ from longer-term ones.
And if you want to get picky...if something is zoned residential, guess what....people ARE residing in the homes in question, just for different lengths of time.
No. Residential means people live there, not just visit for a day after paying someone. That makes it commercial.
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Great. I agree. I own a gun. I want to shoot you with it. After all, I should be able to do anything I want with my property.
Oh, you have a problem with that? Welcome to the real world. You have to play nice with others, which means accepting restrictions. Don't like it? Too bad.
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Great. I agree. I own a gun. I want to shoot you with it. After all, I should be able to do anything I want with my property.
You can shoot your gun all you want, but you can't shoot him because he isn't your property. That would be doing what you want with someone else's property, not your own.
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I've never used Airbnb, but I'm a fan of the idea.
And I do think they innovated. When you get down to it, hotels are in the business of selling trust. The hotel chains are a known quantity. People recognize them and know what they're getting, which is why people up to this point have been staying at them instead of in random homes of strangers. Airbnb's innovation was in figuring out how to aggregate trust effectively, allowing them to become the middleman between a vast untapped supply of rooms and the hug
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Even so, that's a problem that is best addressed through covenants and deed restrictions within the neighborhood, rather than legislation across a city or state.
It is very hard to solve a problem like that using deed restrictions and covenants. Once it starts happening, how do you get a deed restriction added to prevent it? Who enforces a deed restriction in most neighborhoods, anyway? There is nobody who can.
No, zoning at the city level is the only reasonable solution. Local people, and a local office to apply for zoning variances if you have a good case for a different zone applied to your property.
Let neighborhoods that care about that sort of thing sort it out amongst themselves.
Neighborhoods have no legal authority to sort any of that out. I
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Even so, that's a problem that is best addressed through covenants and deed restrictions within the neighborhood, rather than legislation across a city or state.
No! Deed restrictions are evil. Once you sell a thing, it should no longer be yours to control, especially if you're dead. All the things you want deed restrictions to control are better handled by a general law which addresses everyone, because in the best case deed restrictions have to be handled on a confusing case-by-case basis where each one has to be argued over. If you want easements, noise limits and so on, these are by far best handled by ordinances.
I do not think that a municipality should have th
Re:Good, fuck AirBnB (Score:2)
I use AirBNB all the time. Has always worked for me, and my hosts have always been nice, ....
I guess you don't have a name that sounds oriental, or Indian, or black.
And FWIW, I'm none of those, and my one and only experience with AirBnB was shitty. After taking my reservation months in advance, including a deposit, the owner backed out at the last minute because all the sudden he was going through a divorce. I had to scramble to book something else at considerably more expense.
Corporate AirBnB's response: oh, that's too bad. Sorry for the inconvenience.
So no thanks. I'm well enough off that a few e
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I guess you don't have a name that sounds oriental, or Indian, or black.
I host a few spare rooms on Airbnb, and none of that matters. It is French people that are the biggest problem. They complain about everything. I had one French woman leave me a two star review because of heavy traffic on the freeway from the airport.
Irrelevant review comments (Score:2)
Reminds me of Amazon reviews that rate something low because the seller or the shipper screwed up. FFS, that's not applicable to the quality of the product
Re: Good, fuck AirBnB (Score:2)
Noise and location are important in rating a place to stay. Sorry if non Americans are better at using the full range of scale instead of feeling obligated to give 5 stars for adequate service.
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By that definition, every place in Los Angeles should receive no better than 2 stars due to traffic.
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In general, doing business online can often mean dealing with amateurs unwilling or unable to run things smoothly, and maybe the would-be host is an example of that.
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Agreed! I mean, who needs clean water!?
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Re:Whence comes this authority? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where does the city get the authority to tell people that they are not allowed to rent out their homes?
According to the American theory of governance, a government only has authorities that are delegated to it by The People. Well, nobody in Detroit ever had the authority to dictate whether a private individual could rent out his home, so there's no way that anybody was ever able to delegate to the city such an authority.
Whence comes this authority, I ask. WHENCE?!
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" -- Mao Zedong
The reality is that they can do anything they damned well please until and unless someone with more guns either convinces them to, or makes them through force, stop. It sucks and puts people in general in a position with no really "good" choices, but there it is.
It's bad enough when those in power are generally relatively indifferent, but when they become more aggressively authoritarian, then the really bad shit starts. I think we're at the beginning of, or nearly so, of the second stage...if not already well on our way.
I don't have any answers, all I can advise is to be certain of your principles by doing your own homework and not blowing it off or taking other people's opinions as your own, and stick to those principles *especially* when doing so may be really hard or unpopular to do.
Strat
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Hmm...so, what are the gun laws like in Detroit?
A quick look seems to indicate they are somewhat restrictive, much more so than where I live, so..that might tell you something.
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In any functioning democracy, guns don't matter. Votes matter. The guns are there behind it all, but they don't vote.
Re:Whence comes this authority? (Score:4, Informative)
nobody in Detroit ever had the authority to dictate whether a private individual could rent out his home
Sure they did. They had that authority over their own homes, which they voluntarily ceded to the city whenever they gave it the ability to zone. Whether via its charter or subsequent legislation, that zoning authority would have come from the people themselves, and once you establish a city with the ability to zone, you necessarily also grant them the authority to restrict commercial activities in residential zones, which is exactly what they're doing here.
It's the same principle that allows HOAs and the like to establish deeds and covenants that restrict these sorts of practices. As a homeowner, you agree to abide by those deeds and covenants when you enter the neighborhood, thus ceding your authority in that area to the HOA. In my area, quite a few of the neighborhoods have restrictions on how many unrelated people are allowed to be under one roof, specifically to prevent the 70,000 college students we have in town from turning family-friendly neighborhoods into student housing.
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In my area, quite a few of the neighborhoods have restrictions on how many unrelated people are allowed to be under one roof,
This is handled better by zoning, which applies city-wide, and you don't have to have special knowledge of what homes are under an HOA and what that agreement might say. And it won't be the HOA that has to enforce the rules, it will be the city.
This is why R1 and R2 zoning exists, like in Detroit. One and two family residential.
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I doubt you can find any AirBNB host who consented to this nonsense.
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They consented to it when they bought a house in an area that fell under zoning laws.
Real estate always comes with various strings attached. It's the buyer's duty to figure out what those are before they buy.
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Under fee simple, the property owner does not have ultimate ownership and the state has a superior claim (allodial title [wikipedia.org]).
What in these links do you think supports this?
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The US government actually owns the land, which it received from the Crown at the conclusion of the revolutionary war. The Crown actually purchased most of this territory from the Indian tribes, and stole or conque
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R1 and R2 districts in Detroit are for single family homes and two family units. Based on their zoning, even R3 would be a hard sell for allowing temporary rentals. You have to get to
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But now that the price of a house in Detroit has skyrocketed from $1 to almost $100 in some cases, a greater percentage increase than Beverly Hills, the gentrifiers are feeling uppity. No AirBNB in this upscale neighborhood.
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I'll just leave this here. :)
https://youtu.be/K0ug6U26ep0 [youtu.be]
Strat
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I mean, do you just book a ABnB room downtown to have a place to do your crack or heroin after you score?
Doesn't seem to be much else to do in what's left of that city.
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Presumably the wiring and plumbing was taken for scrap. Ruining soemthing for a small percentage of junk value is a prime example of destructive criminal behavior. Too bad, since scrapping makes sense as an economic incentive for recycling trash.
Re:Dil (Score:5, Insightful)
If you own property to rent out, you are not poor.
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Not for long! So it's a shame that Detroit has put up a barrier to prevent them from escaping the cycle of poverty.
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If you OWN A HOME ALREADY you are not IN a cycle of poverty. Most people spend their entire lives trying (and largely failing) to achieve that kind of wealth and security.
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"42 percent of poor households actually own their own homes. [heritage.org]"
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Yeah I'm not just going to accept a right-wing think tank's definition of poverty, thanks.
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Also economically depressed cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, etc. But for the most part you are correct.
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Renting is more expensive than owning.
Exactly, which is why people who already own are richer than people who have to rent. People who have to rent have a large ongoing cost that subtracts from their income, that people who already own don't have, so all else being equal, owners are far richer. You can be a renter and have massive mountains of debt too. The owner's home may be in such disrepair that they'd rather sleep in their car, but at least they have a place to legally park their car without having to pay for it; the would-be renter in the
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But even if you own a home, you're still bribing.
The bribes just go to Taxes, and mortgage payments, and HOA Costs, and the savings you keep for when your water heater explodes or your roof needs to be replaced.
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Property taxes, mortgage interest, and HOA fees I'll give you. Maintenance costs aren't bribing anyone into just letting you use a thing, they're just the cost of repairing it, like if your car breaks down. You're free to keep using the house with a leaky roof or no water heater, which is still more than someone with no house can say.
the problem with generalizations... (Score:2)
Unless, of course:
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In all of those cases but the first one (when you don't really own your house yet, the bank still owns most of it), you are still richer than anyone who doesn't own a home, richer than many people will manage to achieve in their entire lives.
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Even if you have $0 left over from rental income after paying the mortgage, that still means you got someone else to pay your mortgage for you. Someone else is paying off your house; you get a free house out of it. Unless your average costs from all the rest of that (maintenance, legal fights, etc) are high enough to completely negate the mortgage subsidy you're getting from your tenant every month, renting out the property is still just a font of free money for you. Maybe not directly money you can be spen
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The sharing economy could allow people to make use of extra capacity they have anyway, or help justify the purchase of something they'd also use themselves
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That's the sharing economy, when it works well. There's also the people who own cars and houses and pretend to be part of the sharing economy. At least for AirBnB, that's where the main trouble comes from.