Scale Ruins Everything

Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and local government policy had not already guaranteed those outcomes.

Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up.

This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.

The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.

As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic.

I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.

> As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic.

Then you're a landlord who has purchased more of a scarce resource than they require (a house larger than you need) who has then turned around and rented access to the extra you have to people who can't afford a home of their own, and in so doing have driven the cost of homeowner-ship just slightly higher, which was the reason you couldn't afford it in the first place. Repeat that a few thousand times and that's a huge contributing factor to why housing is in such a dire state here.

You haven't solved anything. You just went from being an exploited person to being an exploiter instead, taking advantage of people you should have solidarity with and inflicting the harm the system was inflicting on you, onto them instead. The system will continue feasting on people who can't manage the same as you did, and you now posses wealth you did not earn.

You need to really distinguish between rent seeking landowners, and value add landowners.

Landowners that have made improvements to the land and seek financial compensation for those improvements, in this case in the form of providing a service, is NOT rent seeking behavior.

That is NOT exploitation.

This is even basic economics from an extremely leftist POV, where those that have added labor value, that is improvements to the land, in this case providing a service and perhaps building a unit, managing them, etc. should be compensated for their labor.

Like this is extremely basic stuff.

> You need to really distinguish between rent seeking landowners, and value add landowners.

No, I don't. Rent-seeking is derided behavior by basically everyone who isn't rent-seeking.

If you buy property, improve it, and sell it, there's your profit for providing that service. No ethical lapse whatsoever, unless you used that godawful gray laminate that every flipper uses. Then I'm mad at you still but that's a different reason.

If you own a thing that people need, and you gate access to it behind a paywall while maintaining ownership, and extract value from those people so they may use it but retain full ownership and control of it, that's rent-seeking and it sucks. You're the economic version of wind drag.

Yes, that includes the 98 year old lady who rents out a room to fill the gaps left by social security to the nice young man who's going to college in the area. Still value extraction. That young man is losing the value of his labor because he has to live somewhere and she has space he can live in. That's unethical.