By Feargus O'Sullivan and Jessica Loudis, Bloomberg.com
As tourists flood back, cities have responded with a flurry of new rules on short-term rentals. But policing this housing sector remains a challenge.
It’s been almost 15 years since the launch of Airbnb Inc. kicked off a global boom in short-term home rentals, and it still feels as if no city has yet found the right formula for regulating the sector. But it’s certainly not for lack of trying.
Fearful of seeing long-term rental housing drain away to the tourist market, governments have experimented with a flurry of rules. Dallas has blocked vacation properties in certain residential neighborhoods, Barcelona outlawed all short-term room rentals in private homes, and San Francisco and Seattle limit the number of properties a host is able to list. Others cap the number of nights a property can be rented out in a year (90 in London, 120 in Paris) or mandate a minimum number of nights a property must be rented out (Honolulu guests must book for at least 90 days; Singapore requires six months or more). And many cities insist that hosts actually live in the property (as in New York City, Vancouver and Tokyo).
All these approaches are driven by the same fundamental fear: Left unchecked, home-sharing sites like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, VRBO, and Flipkey drive up rents, displace existing residents and sow chaos in popular districts. In a 2019 study, the Economic Policy Institute concluded that those concerns were real, and the tourist dollars that the services bring in are outweighed by the shrinking of the long-term rental market and the drop in tax hotel revenues.
As post-pandemic travel patterns come roaring back, cities are deploying a fresh round of rules aimed at curbing these costs. But the effectiveness of these tools and rules have been brought into question in many cities that are struggling to overcome enforcement challenges — and outwit rental property owners who are determined to wriggle around the rules.
Hotels in Homes
Take Copenhagen, for example. Denmark banned full-time Airbnbs in 2018, with Copenhagen capping property rentals at 70 nights per year. But in places like the capital’s fashionable, formerly working class Nørrebro district, residents say that short-term renters have taken over anyway.
“My building is half a hotel now,” said H, who lives in an old workers’ tenement in the neighborhood and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from their landlord. The building’s owner has been turning apartments into Airbnbs, H says, but tenants haven't complained because their names risk being made public. “Pointing out illegal Airbnbs to the authorities would alert him to my involvement and my life would become hell,” H said.
As the neighborhood shifts further toward tourism, H is seeking an exit: “I am done fighting. Let there be hotels in homes.”
Airbnb insists that the latest wave of regulation doesn’t reflect the company’s unwillingness to cooperate with local governments.
“Airbnb is a good partner to cities, and we have a longstanding record of welcoming regulation,” said Theo Yedinksy, Airbnb’s global director of policy, in a statement to Bloomberg CityLab. “We have collaborated with more than 1,000 governments around the world on clear, fair rules for short-term rentals.”
In particular, the company cites the launch of its City Portal data tool in 2020 as proof of its commitment to cooperation. The dashboard allows local governments to access certain information on visitors and hosts, tracks the effects of rentals on the local housing market, and helps municipalities create regulations to adjust accordingly. It can also provide approximate — but not exact — locations for listings breaking rules that can help with their detection. So far, more than 350 cities and tourism agencies have signed up. Some 80% of its top 200 markets globally have some type of regulations, Yedinksy said.
Battles in Barcelona, Berlin
Still, policing the hosts of rental platforms has proved to be an endless challenge.
In 2021, New York City banned hosts from renting out space on Airbnb for less than 30 nights if the hosts themselves were not present in the unit, but until July the law was not enforced; Airbnb is fighting the rules in the courts on grounds that they conflict with federal law and are too difficult for hosts to navigate.
In the meantime, residents complaining of rule-breaking in neighboring units have reported that they themselves were subsequently evicted......
Read the complete article at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-02/cities-keep-trying-and-failing-to-regulate-airbnb-nasdaq-abnb?srnd=citylab
Editor's Note:
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