A report from Realtor.com. “For more than a decade, short-term home rental websites such as Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO have helped everyday Americans squeeze some serious cash out of their homes. Easy-peasy! But those carefree good times may be coming to an end. Tensions between unregulated rentals and cities have been simmering for years, spurred by pissed-off neighbors and pushback from landlords and hotel operators. Now they’re boiling over.”

“This year Las Vegas and Washington, DC, will phase out full-home rentals on sites like Airbnb with no owner present, which make up more than 70% of their current markets. New Orleans enacted legislation in January that will push these units out of historic residential neighborhoods. And a number of smaller cities are anticipated to follow their lead.”

“If Airbnb is in your plans, ‘do the math before purchasing a home. Look at how much you could get for a traditional, long-term rental if legislation comes into town and makes that necessary,’ says Peter Lorimer, a real estate broker who stars on the Netflix series ‘Stay Here,’ which helps folks spruce up the properties they list on Airbnb and HomeAway. ‘Make sure it isn’t a saturated [market]. Look at the daily rates of competitors, and see if you can match or beat them.'”

The Monterey Herald in California. “To thwart homeowners from renting out their houses for short periods of time and consequently taking them off the market for long-term renters, the Monterey City Council is continuing its beefed-up enforcement of its short-term rental ban. Karen McBribe from Renters United said the greed coming out of wealthier cities to the north is palpable, particularly with timeshares.”

“‘These are not old-school timeshares,’ she said. ‘These are new-school timeshares coming out of Silicon Valley.'”

From 48 Hills in California. “The San Francisco tech boom is not just an accident. City policies under the late Mayor Ed Lee were designed to attract tech companies to the city, no matter the damage to the rest of us. Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb were allowed to violate local laws with impunity because the mayor saw them as local tech companies that should be encouraged. Thanks to those policies, a relatively small number of people will be getting very rich – and the rest of the city will be getting poorer.”

“Yes: Tech booms like this make most of the city worse off, because they drive up the cost of real estate. That means teachers can’t afford to live here, long-term tenants are thrown on the streets, those who remain have to pay far more than a third of their income (the federal standard) for housing, prices go up in stores and restaurants, small businesses close because the rent is too high … you get the picture. We all know it.”

“City policies have already driven up the cost of land and labor (construction workers can’t live here anymore) and made it so expensive to build that no developer is going to construct workforce housing. And no lender is going to invest in it when there’s so much more to be made in exclusively high-end housing.”

From the New Yorker on Spain. “When Airbnb was founded a decade ago, it marketed itself as a more evolved version of couch surfing. The company soon raised millions of dollars in venture financing, and its listings and aspirations grew glossier. In 2010, Joe Gebbia, one of the founders, told the Times, ‘We started by renting out spare rooms in our apartment, but it’s grown to entire apartments, homes, castles, boats, even private islands.'”

“Brian Chesky, another founder, said at the time that he saw no reason that Airbnb, which extracts commission fees from all transactions, should not grow into a billion-dollar company, by enabling people in appealing locations to ‘monetize their house.'”

“There are almost twenty thousand active Airbnb listings in Barcelona. Even in residential neighborhoods, the sounds of dozens of wheelie suitcases rattling over the cobblestones after an 11 a.m. checkout—and of late-night revellers sampling the bars that have sprung up to cater to them.”

“Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought specifically as short-term-rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties.”

“The true landmark of the contemporary Raval, however, is a billboard that looms over the plaza. Placed there by an activist group, it features an illustration of a ‘not welcome’ mat laid over a puddle of lood, and announces, in Catalan, a list of aggressors to the neighborhood: real-estate speculators, tourist mobs, and Airbnb.”

“The protests in the Barceloneta precipitated greater cohesion among neighborhood groups throughout the city, many of which were concerned about similar problems, such as access to housing and privatization of public space. They began voicing opposition to the pestilence of young visitors who came to Barcelona not to sample the local culture but to enact internationally recognized tropes of partying, as if it were Mardi Gras three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”

“‘It’s Magaluf all over again,’ a leader of a neighborhood association said at the time. He was referring to a town in Majorca that had become so overrun with intoxicated Britons that the local government was obliged to remind visitors not to defecate in the streets.”

“In Bologna, I met an Airbnb host named Mauro Bigi. He looked forward to being able to list his apartment on Fairbnb, not least because Airbnb’s algorithm had started pushing him to rent his apartment for a price so low that it no longer made economic sense for him to do so. Airbnb, he went on, encouraged a kind of professionalization of hosting—such as offering twenty-four-hour check-in—that he was unwilling to engage in.”

From News Talk in Ireland. “Threshold CEO John-Mark McCafferty said there were 5,762 Airbnb listings in Dublin alone last month, 41% of which were available as full-time holiday rentals. He said thousands of properties have also been removed from the housing stock in Galway and Cork.”

“‘While tourists are always welcome and short-term letting platforms, such as Air BnB, have a role to play in the tourist market and wider economy, this volume of short-term lets is taking units that would otherwise be available for long-term rent out of that market,’ he said. ‘These new restrictions will release badly needed housing onto the market and we believe it can have a positive impact for those families who are currently experiencing homelessness.'”

“Airbnb said it was a ‘false promise’ to claim that the regulations could offer a solution to the housing crisis.”

From Vice on Australia. “In the Byron Shire, where according to the Australian Coastal Councils Association, 17.6 of properties are rented to tourists via short-term holiday letting agreements, including Airbnb.”

“Scrolling through the Byron community houseshare pages on Facebook, there’s an abundance of young people, couples and single parents looking for a place to rent. One of these pages, Reasonable Rentals Northern Rivers NSW, was shut down in January after one of the administrators conceded that there were nowhere near enough reasonable rentals available per month for the 10,000 members of the group.”

“In the Northern Rivers of NSW, 74 percent of Airbnb rentals were entire houses as of 2017. In that year alone, one host in Byron Bay made $3.7 million from the 40 properties they had listed. And more than half of Byron’s ‘hosts’ have multiple listings.”

“How is it that a Silicon Valley tech company can have more power than the government? The acting mayor’s answer is remarkably frank: ‘Because we have a system that allows corporations to donate to political parties and buy policy outcomes.'”