It’s painful to observe what’s happening to so many U.S. cities. Already before lockdowns, there was growing crime, high costs, overregulation, high taxes, decaying infrastructure, and declining educational standards.
The small-business shutdowns, vaccination mandates, masking policies, and the rise of civilian COVID-19 rats everywhere caused a mass exodus to the suburbs and to red states. This left cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and New York City in bad shape ahead of the refugee crisis.
The “sanctuary cities” are now some of the least safe places in the world.
The crisis is so apparent just from a quick visit. One would suppose that right now, the politicians would be in a scramble to enliven small business, reduce costs, crack down on crime, attract residents and capital back, and deliver the best possible conditions for a revival.
That’s what rationality would dictate. Sadly, we’re seeing the exact opposite.
Today comes the news that New York City has in effect blocked Airbnb from renting within the city. There seems to be no justification. It will massively hurt tourism. It also hurts the people who have hung on through thick and thin and are barely getting by with overpriced housing, hoping to get at least some financial benefit by renting out some otherwise useless space.
And the city just shows up and says, “No more!”
Of course, they don’t just ban them outright. They regulate them out of existence.
- Short-term rentals can accommodate no more than two paying guests at a time, regardless of the property’s size or the number of bedrooms.
- Hosts are required to be physically present while their properties are being rented.
- Hosts and visitors must leave the interior doors within the rental unlocked, allowing occupants access to the entire unit.
Airbnb has responded by saying that this all amounts to a de facto ban. This will drive up the price of hotels and make it nearly impossible to visit for any length of time, meaning fewer people spending money on Broadway, which is already in trouble, and restaurants, which are barely surviving in this grim environment.
But why not simply register your home?
“The OSE also maintains a Prohibited Buildings List of units that can’t be rented short-term due to lease terms or rent regulations. Penalties for hosts for violations of these regulations can range from $100 to $1,000 for the first offense, while guests will not face penalties for staying in an illegal property.”
Why doesn’t Airbnb sue? It tried. The judge dismissed the lawsuit.
Bizarre, you say? Indeed. There’s no one out there right now saying: What New York City needs right now are far fewer affordable opportunities for visitors to rest their heads at night. How does it come to be that such ghastly legislation would be passed right now?
I don’t have the answer, but it surely has something to do with the hotel lobby. It doesn’t like the competition for stays in the city and figures that reducing the number of available units will drive up prices for hotels. Lord knows, the hotels need the revenue given the high labor costs and high costs of everything else.
So let’s have a look.
On Airbnb, there are a handful of listings that have survived in Manhattan—all running between $300 and $400 per night, if you can believe it. This is for late October. After December, Airbnb will be forced to take off all listings without a special sticker, driving prices even higher. The hotels in the same period are running $500 to $1,000, but of course, you can pay as much as $10,000 a night if you have the means and you’re exceedingly profligate.
How can any normal person even consider such a deal? They simply can’t. And this happens at a time when Broadway is still struggling, Lincoln Center is canceling concerts for lack of interest, and visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are still just half of what they were pre-lockdown.
At the same time, I’m seeing scads of hotels in Miami at $50 to $100 and outstanding hotels at $200 per night, for luxury living. It’s the same in Dallas and Houston. Charleston, South Carolina, is more, but you can still find an outstanding place for less than $300, plus plenty of Airbnbs for far less.
Manhattan and the surrounding areas are now unique in forbidding people from using their own property to rent out a room except under extremely unusual conditions.
Truly, it just boggles the mind how in the world lawmakers could somehow manage to do the exact opposite of that which stands a slight chance of promoting a revival. Banning people from renting out space in their own houses can only end in lowering property values and driving more people out of the city. How can they not know this? Surely, they do. There must be some kind of backroom deal that enabled this.
There’s an even deeper problem here that traces to academia itself. Most of these cities have their own form of deep state. They have city planners that stay regardless of the mayor, and these include zoning commissions and a plethora of bureaucrats that are hired because of their academic credentials. Every Ivy League urban planning course focuses on everything but free enterprise and economic growth. Instead, the central focus is on ever more regulation.
These people inhabit all of the highest positions in city government around the country. As a result, they never consider more freedom as the answer to anything. It’s always about passing more restrictions against the use of property. This has gone on for many decades. Even in the face of massive decline, they can’t let go of their restrictionist and regulatory mindsets.
It’s bad enough to sit back and do nothing in the face of relentless urban decline. But it’s next-level crazy to add to the blows by doing preposterously destructive things such as banning Airbnb.
