(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Other cities take note as New York City tells Airbnb: Fuhgeddaboudit – Daily Montanan [1] ['Robbie Sequeira', 'More From Author', '- January'] Date: 2024-01-23 NEW YORK — New York City’s options of where to stay are shrinking. For years, it has been illegal for homes in New York City to be rented out for fewer than 30 days. However, the ordinance was hardly enforced. And many property owners earned money through the rise of short-term rentals. But the city in September began enforcing a new ordinance that requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city. The ordinance, which passed in January 2022 but had been held up in court, also ices out market juggernauts Airbnb, Vrbo and similar platforms from processing transactions for any unregistered short-term rentals. Hosts can get city approval to offer short-term rentals only if they are on the premises during the visitors’ stay, and if the number of guests is limited to two. That’s expected to severely limit the number of available rentals, since few hosts are willing to meet those requirements. In recent weeks, thousands of New York City short-term rentals have vanished from Airbnb’s webpage, and on Dec. 2, the company cancelled and refunded all reservations for unregistered rentals made through the portal. The city and company had agreed to allow all previous reservations with check-ins by Dec. 1. The aim of the crackdown is to return thousands of possible long-term rental units to the city’s housing market, which is short on available and affordable options. If New York City’s approach is successful, policy experts think other cities might emulate the city’s restrictions. But the city faces an uphill battle in meeting the sizable demand for short-term stays; tourism promoters predict 63.3 million visitors this year, and hotel occupancy hovers near 90%. And many observers doubt whether such limits would significantly reopen housing units to long-term tenants. Officials from the Mayor’s Special Office of Enforcement, the agency tasked with registering legal short-term rentals in New York City, told Stateline that there are slightly more than 800 licensed short-term legal rentals entering December. In August, there were nearly 22,000 Airbnb short-term rentals alone. More than 5,170 applications had been submitted to the office as of Nov. 20, with about 500 denied and more than 1,700 sent back to applicants for added information or to “correct deficiencies” in the application. Jorge González, a researcher with the Urban Institute, a nonprofit think tank, said the success of New York’s crackdown will depend on whether hotels can pick up the slack. Rentals and housing The nation’s housing crunch has many officials blaming short-term rentals for taking shelter off the market. A 2016 article in the Harvard Law & Policy Review suggested that short-term rentals “[reduce] the affordable housing supply” by removing long-term rentals from the housing market and keeping local residents from moving in. Dozens of localities throughout the United States have regulated short-term rentals. But none has gone as far as New York City. “The law and rules effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City and are a stark contrast to cities around the world that have enacted fair and balanced short-term rental rules,” wrote Theo Yedinsky, Airbnb’s global policy director, in a June letter on the company’s website. Airbnb says it worked for years to find a compromise. “These rules are an outlier and stand in contrast to the approach of other cities around the country, going as far as to prohibit New Yorkers from sharing their homes when they are away for work or travel, hosting more than two guests at the same time, and requiring that they must certify they understand numerous lengthy and complicated city codes,” the company wrote in a prepared statement in response to Stateline. González said policies to regulate the short-term rental market in both domestic and international cities have varied, from capping the length of a rental stay to restricting the number of guests to requiring the host to be on the premises. “If New York City’s policy is successful, it could embolden other cities to follow suit and use this as a way to not only rein in this industry, but possibly address these long-term rental housing crises,” said González. “I think there will be a lot learned in the next few weeks and months on whether this is an effective policy measure.” One of the consequences of the city’s crackdown on Airbnb listings is already taking shape. More than 90% of the city’s current Airbnb rental stock of nearly 40,000 units — of which 3,746 are short-term rentals — is unlicensed, according to Inside Airbnb, a housing activist group that tracks the platform’s data. The fear of rising hotel prices and the dearth of legal rentals are prompting some tourists to turn to short-term rentals listed on Craigslist, part of a burgeoning alternative market of unregistered, unlicensed short-term rentals in the wake of the city’s restrictions. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/01/23/other-cities-take-note-as-new-york-city-tells-airbnb-fuhgeddaboudit/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/