Airbnb recently announced it bought an office building in Manhattan. That’s great to hear. Even though Airbnb has not actually committed to hiring or transferring any new workers as part of the purchase, New Yorkers should be happy to have the company’s property taxes.
They can buy as much property as they want. They just can’t lease our homes.
Why? Short-term rentals like the ones Airbnb has made billions off of are a housing killer. It’s just math. Apartments that they lease to tourists can’t be leased to local residents — and that would mean fewer homes and higher rents for New Yorkers. That’s why in New York apartments on Airbnb’s platform must be rented for a minimum of 30 days.
Airbnb pretends like the city’s common sense restrictions are new. They’re not. They have been in place for nearly a century. But because multi-billion-dollar short-term-rental big-tech companies from California started ignoring our rules nearly two decades ago, we had to codify them into law in 2021 and create penalties to stop their insidious spread.
Airbnb also frequently says, bizarrely, that rules preventing them from leasing apartments to outsiders has not solved the housing crisis. Of course not. The law is meant to ensure that Airbnb doesn’t gobble up the homes we already have and make our housing crisis even worse.
How do we know that it would? Because Airbnb was already making our housing crisis worse before we clarified the law. And since we did, tens-of-thousands of apartments are back on the market for renters.
In fact, cities around the globe have risen up against Airbnb and outright banned them for this exact reason. Barcelona, Paris and Madrid have all banned Airbnb recently, explicitly in order to return thousands of housing units back to the market for its residents.
Residents of those cities and others — including here in the United States — have also expressed concern about public safety issues linked to short-term rentals and the companies’ lack of accountability to the communities and buildings they operate in.
Finally, Airbnb repeats over and over that their gargantuan, hugely profitable business is some kind of social cause to help those who can’t afford their mortgages. Please. Around the world, Airbnb makes its money by allowing landlords and homeowners to turn their apartments into unregulated hotels — but without all the labor costs and cumbersome health and safety rules.
Why else would they have pushed a bill last year to allow one- and two-family homes to become short-term rentals for more than six months without the primary lease holder being on premise? What parents could afford to have their kids in school for just six months? What older couple is both so in need of mortgage help that they need to partially rent their home out, plus somehow also has a second residence where they can live half the year?
One- and two-family homes represent 30% of the city’s total housing stock, and 14% of its rentals. A property that is rented short-term for more than a year is no longer permanent housing for New Yorkers. That is not good for renters and not good for neighborhoods. But all of these problems are not Airbnb’s concern; increased profits are.
That is why Airbnb shoveled millions of dollars into the accounts of local elected officials through their super PAC. And, now, with the help of those same Council members, a new bill has been introduced to try to gut our laws again.
Enough. Airbnb is welcome to move into our office buildings, but they are evicted from our homes — permanently.
Cayler is the leader of the Coalition Against Illegal Hotels.