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New York City Finally Proposes Strict New Regulations for Airbnb Rentals (marketwatch.com) 137

New York City "is pressing ahead with a long-anticipated crackdown on Airbnb hosts," reports the New York Post, "with officials on Friday proposing a strict new registration system for hosts that will take effect in January."

There's 30 pages of rules... Under proposed rules that were quietly and unexpectedly made public on Friday — which will, among other things, prohibit hosts from renting out an "entire registered dwelling unit" — Airbnb hosts will be required to submit diagrams of their apartments as well as proof that their listings are permanent residences. Hosts also will be required to list the "full legal name of all permanent occupants of the dwelling" as well as their relationship to the host....

If hosts fail to comply, they can be fined up to $5,000 under the new rules, while Airbnb and other platforms are required to verify the rental on its systems and could be on the hook for a $1,500 fine per violation. Last year, the city council passed the registration law, but little was known about the details and requirements, which will become effective Jan. 9 and enforced by May 9....

Among the requirements, said the source, is one that bars hosts from putting locks on doors that separate the guest from the host, directing that "a registered host shall not allow a rentee to have exclusive access to a separate room within a dwelling" and specifying that, for example, "providing the rentee with a key to lock the door when such rentee is not in the dwelling is prohibited...."

It's the latest salvo in the fraught relationship between New York City and Airbnb, which has long pushed back on the city's efforts to regulate the industry. Meanwhile the city blames Airbnb, in part, for its housing shortage.

Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for submitting the story!
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New York City Finally Proposes Strict New Regulations for Airbnb Rentals

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  • Thank ****ing God (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:24PM (#63030087)
    it's about time. It's getting to the point where even well above median income you can't afford to live. A Vietnamese buddy of mine was talking about how America was starting to look like 1970's 'Nam. Multiple families stuffed into a single apartment.
    • You save on heat during the winter that way.

    • it's about time. It's getting to the point where even well above median income you can't afford to live.

      And you think this will help in the slightest... interesting.

      NYC was already a terrible place to have an Air BnB, so there were not many. Most of the ones left already basically comply, where you are renting out a room and not a whole place (I know this because two different times I tried to rent out an apartment in NYC, years ago, the city made them drop the Air BnB listing before I even went on my trip

      • by hjf ( 703092 )

        I hope that means "non-residents", not "non-citizens". Imagine living as an immigrant in the US and having permanent residency but not being allowed to buy a property because you don't have citizenship.

        • Looks like permanent residents (and students) are not banned in Canada [npr.org].

          That does make sense, they are trying to stop foreign investors really, not so much individuals who have to live in the city.

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          I hope that means "non-residents", not "non-citizens". Imagine living as an immigrant in the US ...

          What they should say is a Non-Citizen may not be sold the ownership to bare land, and may not be sold the ownership to property containing a home or individual dwelling unit for Investment purposes that they didn't pay to construct, And cap what the median per-dwelling unit rate of rent per building is allowed to be for new constructions.

          If they are a resident intending to live there, and they can show they

          • by genixia ( 220387 )

            Wonderful in principle, but how do you stop the Panama corporation owned Delaware corporation from buying property without impacting legitimate local businesses too?

            The UK has the same problem in London. A large number of buildings sit empty because they are little more than a tax-sheltered investment for rich foreigners such as Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes. One of the purposes of the UK's Stamp Tax (a tax levied on each sale of a property) is to prevent real estate speculation from driving up pric

            • by mysidia ( 191772 )

              but how do you stop the Panama corporation owned Delaware corporation from buying property without impacting legitimate local businesses too?

              A good start would be to firstly mandate a US-based principal be the Only parties that interest in real Property rights can be conveyed to By a Deed or contract. A contract or deed will be unlawful if it specifies Real estate to be transferred without receiving and recording complete authentic, notarized Attestation documents of Resident or US Citizen status with the

      • by spitzak ( 4019 )

        A vacancy tax would be far better and get rid of misbehaving investors whether they are Chinese or Canadian.

      • Guys like you are all or nothing. If we can't 100% completely solve a problem in every way shape and form you act like it's completely unsolvable and that we shouldn't do anything. It's a classic rhetorical tactic the right wing has been using going all the way back to the enlightenment when the right wing got its name. Along with an unhealthy obsession with hierarchies and either pushing people around beneath you or being pushed around by people above you this is one of the core aspects of the right wing.
    • Either he's in a trailer park/slum where undocumented immigrants are living (yes, they stack 20+ adults to one house in some circumstances), or he's in a city with hostile zoning laws. Some parts of the country do not have this problem, yet AirBnB operates in those places as well.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I wonder if it will really help though. Will the owners throw up their hands and sell now that they can't be an AirBNB, or will they just switch to the long term rental market?

      • Will the owners throw up their hands and sell now that they can't be an AirBNB, or will they just switch to the long term rental market?

        Either is preferable, obviously.

    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      Google says there are 3.5 million dwellings in NYC, and somewhere between 10k and 20k AirBnB (or equivalents).

      Regardless of how you feel about AirBnB (I have never used it, don't really trust it) there is no way that 0.3 - 0.6% of housing be used as an AirBnB, even if it's 100% use for rental and not an actual home, would have any appreciable effect on the overall market.

      • The smaller the percentage of housing available, and there is usually a very small percentage of unoccupied dwellings in NYC, the smaller the percentage of dwellings have to be taken off the market to cause a shortage.

      • I don't think Google's numbers are accurate. Just from a cursory search of news articles it seems that there are more airbnbs than there are apartments available for rent. Google is probably trying to use airbnb's systems to show available rental units and just not successfully putting the data together. It looks like there's many times more airbnbs than what Google is reporting. It's also possible that those airbnbs are paying Google or promotion and so that you might only be seeing what Google is being pa
  • Long overdue (Score:5, Insightful)

    by khchung ( 462899 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:49PM (#63030137) Journal

    These "sharing" economy should go back to actually sharing, rather than an excuse to go around existing regulations.

    • Re:Long overdue (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:54PM (#63030153)
      I don't recall anyone using these sort of things for sharing. Every single one I have ever seen has just been an end run around labor law or zoning regulations. Was there maybe something in the distant past that lasted for a couple of minutes or something? If there was I never heard of it. As far as I can tell the phrase sharing economy has always been a smoke screen to keep The regulators off
      • Re:Long overdue (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @08:41PM (#63030225)

        Every single one I have ever seen has just been an end run around labor law or zoning regulations.

        That's the whole point of the Gig Work Economy - people (typically of well above median income) finding ways to circumvent regulations, mostly at the expense of lower income individuals.

        • Lower income individuals? Are they setting up AirBnBs in trailer parks and housing projects now?

          • by cstacy ( 534252 )

            Lower income individuals? Are they setting up AirBnBs in trailer parks and housing projects now?

            Yes.

        • That's the whole point of the Gig Work Economy - people (typically of well above median income) finding ways to circumvent regulations, mostly at the expense of lower income individuals.

          Well, that's not the original theory. The original point was there's tons of capital not being used as much as it could. Sharing was a way to make better use of all that expensive, underutilized capital. For example, I drive my car maybe an hour a day. It's a waste to have it sit idle the other 23. Could, perhaps, I make use of it by sharing with others? Well, people don't actually like just giving strangers the keys to that morphed into driving "friends" around for a fee. Same for AirBnB: I have a spare ro

    • These "sharing" economy should go back to actually sharing

      How does one go back to something they never did in the first place?

  • In cities line NY (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @08:05PM (#63030167) Homepage
    In cities like NY, commercial rental companies love Airbnb. All it does is inflate already high rents in the City. I would like to see this passed, but I would make a minor adjustment. The fine is $5000 per day for each violation.
    • NY residents are fucked because the city cannot finance it's massive budget otherwise than to puncture and dry out each and every possible revenue stream. --get a Chargehanger

    • Re:In cities line NY (Score:5, Interesting)

      by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Monday November 07, 2022 @05:58AM (#63031137)

      When the pandemic hit and people were fleeing central London, it because apparent that a huge amount of the central housing stock was being used for AirBnb. In the small area around where I lived within Zone 1, at least 30-40 apartments suddenly got listed as long term lets that were clearly being used as AirBnb previously (the listing photos were in many cases right off AirBnb and many had the same furnishings and stock pictures on the wall as they were being run by the same management companies). Another thing I realised is how this was being done on an industrial scale - we tried to rent an AirBnb near us during the lockdowns as our studio flat was tiny, and the AirBnb 'host' told us that they couldn't go below a certain price because they wouldn't be making any profit on the rental. This didn't make any sense (surely any income is better than none) and I eventually discovered they were just the final tier supplier in a sophisticated chain, and under them was another organisation that probably owned lots of flats in the area and leased them out to 'retailers' who could fill them off AirBnb/OneHome/Gumtree etc.

      The thing is though, permanent short term leasing like this was supposed to be banned in London already. We got told by the govt back in 2016 that they were solving the AirBnb issue by passing a law to limit short term lets of a property to only 90 days in a year. So how were these guys able to do it? In the end I looked into the govt regulation, and realised that compliance with the law came down to the local council, who had no power to demand records from AirBnb, and hence if they wanted to enforce the ban, they had to collect evidence that the property was being let for more than 90 days in the year. Beyond posting a council officer outside the property for 91 days of the year, this was essentially impossible to enforce, and so for all practical purposes it wasn't.

      So be careful with these promises of 'regulation' because in the UK they have proven to be completely hollow, even though the govt is happy to stand up and say it has fixed the problem and all the residents priced out by these psuedo-hotels just need to suck it up.

    • In cities like NY, commercial rental companies love Airbnb. All it does is inflate already high rents in the City. I would like to see this passed, but I would make a minor adjustment. The fine is $5000 per day for each violation.

      No, low supply and high demand is what drives prices up. All AirBnB is doing is exposing what the market clearing price really is. Previously it was hidden by invisible lines of people who wanted to rent but couldn't because nothing was available at any price.

      Want to really fix that? Build more. Build 50 story apartment buildings all up and down every subway line, not just limited parts of Manhattan. Double or triple the number of units in the city.

  • For NYC that seems amazingly short and concise, possibly approaching reasonable. How the hell did that happen?
  • Like always, too much of a idea good ends up having bad consequences. Airbnb's are great for large groups of people, especially families visiting a place. It is usually much cheaper and nicer to stay together in a single home/apartment for your holiday. Normally this works great but it backfires in very popular and expensive places like New York where it exacerbates a housing crises. The flip side is that all those tourists bring in money to the city supporting jobs and businesses.

    • Like always, too much of a idea good ends up having bad consequences. Airbnb's are great for large groups of people, especially families visiting a place.

      Holiday home rentals were a thing long before airbnb showed up, and will remain long after airbnb is relegated to the annals of history.

  • hotel lobbying (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 )

    I can see how happy you all seem to be with these news, I am quite certain not all of you are lobbying for hotels, so then what is it? Oh, I got it. You don't actually believe in private property rights, so to you a government preventing people from using their own property in a way they prefer is abhorrent. Oh well, you also believe this will *lower* the prices somehow? As if government regulations are ever capable of removing costs? Curious. Of course you are also the same people that argue for high

    • Tell us, how do you feel about zoning laws?
      • Re:hotel lobbying (Score:4, Informative)

        by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Monday November 07, 2022 @04:34AM (#63030963) Homepage Journal

        I will tell you. In the USA these zoning laws created the urban sprawl and made it impossible for people in the suburbs to walk to a store, you have to drive everywhere. Designating entire swaths of land as noncommercial in the strictest sence. It is not just "don't put a metal factory near a house, but don't put a store, a coffee shop, a bakery, a bar, a hair salon, anything near a house, houses are sacred and cannot be near some place of business that makes living comfortable". Zoning bylaws are responsible for traffic jams, fuel burning and plenty of global warming, obesity and other sickness, ghettos and segregation, unequal education opportunities and much more. I am sure there are people who study such things and I am sure zoning bylaws are a disaster in every way but one - forcing you to pay more in costs and taxes.

        • In the USA these zoning laws created the urban sprawl and made it impossible for people in the suburbs to walk to a store

          Food deserts are not primarily caused by zoning, they are caused by it being unprofitable to serve poorer communities. Every suburb I have been to to has a comfortably located supermarket, those people have shopping options because there's profit in serving them.

        • by jbengt ( 874751 )

          I will tell you. In the USA these zoning laws created the urban sprawl and made it impossible for people in the suburbs to walk to a store, you have to drive everywhere. Designating entire swaths of land as noncommercial in the strictest sence. It is not just "don't put a metal factory near a house, but don't put a store, a coffee shop, a bakery, a bar, a hair salon, anything near a house, houses are sacred and cannot be near some place of business that makes living comfortable".

          Not that simple.
          Most hous

        • by cstacy ( 534252 )

          I will tell you. In the USA these zoning laws created the urban sprawl and made it impossible for people in the suburbs to walk to a store, you have to drive everywhere.

          Ummm, so you are complaining that you live in the suburbs. Why don't you just live in the city, which is wnat you want?

    • by jbengt ( 874751 )

      You don't actually believe in private property rights, so to you a government preventing people from using their own property in a way they prefer is abhorrent.

      You actually believe people using their own property in a way they prefer without limits is OK, then you won't mind if you neighbor starts a business holding raves in his backyard every weekend from 10:00 pm Friday night to 4am Sunday morning.

      • I really don't mind, I lived in dozens if places in my lifetime, including where I purchased apartments with restaurants downstairs that are blasting music loudly at night as well.

        However I am talking about zoning bylaws, not local noise and pollution laws, they are different laws.

  • So, I have never used AirBnB but I had kind of gotten the impression that folks were basically using it to rent out entire apartments/ houses for short term stays etc (like hotel or typical beach house rentals etc)

    Even though "Bed And Breakfast" is ... in the name I somehow got the impression it was not being used for B&B but for the above.

    Or is this unique to NYC?

  • I understand what the city is trying to get at, but the rules listed in the summary seem vague and nonsensical.

    Par for the course for NYC.

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