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.

When I read stuff like this, I'm left wondering if I'm the only person who actually lives in a place that has been infested with Airbnb. On paper, my neighborhood is the Hacker News dreamland. Nobody has a yard. There is train service. Many people don't have cars. There is no mandatory parking allowance. There is no zoning restriction against multifamily housing. Virtually every unit is at least attached. Multi-use is fine. Plenty of buildings contain both housing and businesses. There isn't a lot of traffic. It's walkable. The only major restriction is you can't build higher than five stories. And we've been in a construction boom for nearly a decade.

But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra.

With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.

That should drive your property value down, not up.