You probably don't really believe that. For instance, if you buy a house in a sleepy residential neighborhood, you probably don't really believe it's reasonable to convert it into a noisy 24/7 tool and die shop.
The interesting question is, where do you draw the line at what should and shouldn't be regulated?
> Community consensus, which as luck would have it, is fairly easy to come to on a local geographic level.
Unfortunately that's not really sustainable. For instance let's say the community agreed that you can turn your home into a noisy 24/7 tool and die shop. Now 5 years past and half of the neighborhood has different home owners in it (quick turnaround for moving half a community but I've seen crazier things). Now the entire community wants them GONE.
Do we say it's okay one year then a few years later go "oh sorry but you can't do your business here anymore"? Moving or even closing up could cost the business owner a substantial amount of money not to mention the loss of customers now not necessarily knowing they moved, etc.
Point being while I don't know where the line is for regulating and not regulating something I also don't think community consensus is a silver bullet.
The community originally says it's okay for 24/7 noise. Some of them move out and other people move in. They know when they move in that there is a 24/7 noise shop there, and they don't have much right to demand because they are the thing that's changed.
Exactly, and who is the agent of change when your neighborhood fills up with transient tenants? Why, it's AirBnB of course. Ergo, AirBnB should be regulated.
I've said it before: cities that care about their current residents should enact 2 limits: tourist zones where year-round full-unit, full-building rentals are allowed, taxed and regulated like hotels (yes, you run a business, you pay commercial property tax, in addition to sales and nightly tax). And then in the remaining residential zones, limit homestays to 40 or 60 days, regardless of whether they are owner occupied or not, with AirBnB collecting taxes and fees for the city and reporting all nightly counts to the city. There could also be complete homestay exclusion zones, but that can also be handled by condo/neighborhood association rules.
The regulation can be tailored to local desires and needs: number of days, requiring permits or just allowing anyone to operate, and requiring owner-occupancy during visitor stays or not.
Note that nothing prevents regular residences at resident-occupied tax rates in the "commercial" zone, just that buyers in that zone know they can convert if they want, but so can their neighbors.
I agree completely. We have different zoning laws, so why is San Francisco applying a single short term rental law across the entire city?
As I said in an earlier post, I would like to trade my right to run a hotel out of my house in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that my neighbors won't do this either.
However, I certainly don't see why the preferences of people who live in largely SFH zones in the outer mission or outer sunset should govern north beach or the inner mission. That's up to them.
You're not sure about a solution, but I am: community consensus and governance.
If there needs to be a noisy shop there, people will want it to be there. If there doesn't need to be one there, people will want it to move to an industrial zoned area.
That's good for society.
Generally with a condo you have less freedom than you do if you buy a house with no common areas.
Hotels are prepared to deal with problems that tenants may cause. Locks are re-programmable between stays. Security, housekeeping and maintenance people on staff. Etc.
In a condo building, any problems caused in the common areas are going to end up being the responsibility of the association. Which is generally going to be ill equipped and probably unwilling to deal with any issues since they are getting no benefit from it.
You have never been able to do what you want with your house. Try, for example, not cutting the grass. Most cities have laws against that. And this is just an example, it is even worse if you try to use your house for commercial purposes.
Yes, and 'not cutting the grass' laws are frequently ABUSED by governments to basically kick out poor people from their neighborhood and pave it over for redevelopment for cronies.
And why, other than NIMBY, should other owners care (let alone get to restrict) whether you live in your house or let other people pay you to live in it?
They should care whether your tenants behave responsibly, but then they also care whether you behave responsibly, so there's little difference there.
The entire premise of government (at each level of granularity: federal, state, local, housing association) is that society must determine what is acceptable behavior and what is not. E.g., You cannot dump toxic waste on your land.
You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased. This is why {Walmart, Airports, etc} cannot just be built willy-nilly in residential neighborhoods.
> The entire premise of government (at each level of granularity: federal, state, local, housing association) is that society must determine what is acceptable behavior and what is not. E.g., You cannot dump toxic waste on your land.
Not disputing that; however, it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency). It shouldn't matter whether the residents are short-term or long-term, as long as they're held to the same standard.
> You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased.
It's NIMBY when those restrictions are arbitrary (in particular when they restrict things that don't actually affect neighbors, other than their sense of moral outrage) and changeable in ways that affect existing residents who haven't agreed and only bought into the old restrictions.
The problem is that those things that actually affect neighbors are mostly things that have to be remediated after the fact assuming that they can be--and, perhaps, on multiple occasions. So it's not unreasonable to put in place pre-emptive rules that reduce the chance of those things happening in the first place.
I'll give a simple example. my aunt owns a house here in AZ, and one out in NY. Lives in each for 6 months out of the year (ish). When she's not there, she rents them out.
About a year ago, Verizon sent her DMCA takedown notices, and started their "warning" system (i.e. the step program or whatever it's called). I told her about the safe harbor protections, and she spoke to the tenant several times.
Literally, the only thing that stopped the tenant from torrenting was installing OpenWRT on the router and setting up the nftables/iptables to block udp traffic (only after talking to the tenant 8 times).
The only thing that can prevent some people from behaving badly is the absence of a chance to do so.
Zoning is already a solution to this problem, why do we need to solve it again? Only places zoned for business/tenancy should be acceptable places to rent.
"it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency)"
Here's the thing, even this is an area where people will reasonably disagree.
For instance, suppose you have a couple of kids, and they build friendships with the other kids around your neighborhood. Let's say that a family with a couple of kids gets outbid on the house next to you, because the new buyer can price in the profits of putting 3 bedrooms full time on airbnb, whereas the family would be filling them with two extremely expensive young children. In this case, airbnb could end up turning a substantial amount of the SFH housing stock into hotels.
Kids are just one example of the ways people may wish to live in a neighborhood. Obviously, kids are not the only reason people might wish to get to know their neighbors and form longer relationships with them.
So these people would like to trade their right to put their house or apartment on airbnb in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Other people won't, which is why I support zoning laws that regulate tenancy length, but would prefer to see them kept as local as is practically possible.
What I firmly believe is that these zoning laws are reasonable[1] in some areas, and that people should not break the law and impose a hotel on a neighborhood that has democratically chosen to live under this kind of zoning regulation.
[1] There are clearly unreasonable neighborhood regulations that are not up to majority vote, and history is full of them.
