>The legislation allows you to rent a spare room in your house. What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out. [...] If you are renting an entire apartment out on AirBnB full time, you are deciding to run an unregulated hotel rather than rent a traditional long-term lease.
As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel. This makes it possible for many people to afford to live in NYC.
>As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel.
Sure, but how does a lawmaker regulate and enforce "it's OK to rent out a spare room, or rent out an apartment while you travel, but it's not okay to only use the apartment as a hotel?"
What if someone travels 90% of the time - that's darn close to just running it as a hotel. Should there be some numerical limit? 50% of nights? How does the city check and enforce that? What if someone has a significant other or family member they can always stay with and are always willing to rent their apartment if someone is willing to rent it from them? Is that OK?
A strict "you must be present in the abode and renting a spare room" rule is over-broad, but trying to make and enforce a more narrowly tailored rule seems very difficult in implementation. With this rule, you can just check each ad - an ad will be allowed or disallowed on its face.
If you allow for occasional renting-while-traveling, you need rules for how much "traveling" is OK and you need a more complex system to monitor whether an ad is legal. Is it a legal occasionally-rented-whiled-"traveling" space or illegal because it is a too-often-occasionally-rented space?
It seems to me like this is best left up to individual building associations and landlords. Maybe it's time to deregulate hotels a bit too, since online reviews have corrected a lot of the information asymmetry that the regulations were trying to deal with in the first place.
>It seems to me like this is best left up to individual building associations and landlords.
That is to say "I think that this issue shouldn't be regulated" or "I disagree with this law." And it's fine to think either of those.
But if you decide that you don't want these unregulated-essentially-hotels existing (which the lawmakers apparently decided), how to craft that into law that is practical to monitor and enforce?
The legislation does a good job of creating a clear rule that can be implemented by scanning the advertisements. More complex rules that sometimes allow renters to use the whole apartment would suffer from more complex monitoring requirements.
Woah, wait. There are "many people" who can only afford to live in NYC if they rent out their apartment when they travel? I have so many questions. How much do they make? How much is their rent? How much do their vacations cost? How much do they make from airbnb?
As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel. This makes it possible for many people to afford to live in NYC.