Airbn-banned: New York Finally Cracks Down on Illegal Landlords
Good riddance. Thousands of families will get to live indoors again
Evidently I’m the Internet’s go-to anti-Airbnb guy, because I can’t tell you how many people emailed, messaged, and tweeted/X’d me in the past 48 hours to let me know what I’d already heard:
“New York City just banned Airbnb.”
Of course, NYC didn’t actually outright ban $ABNB.
They simply made the company do what it says it exists to do: Allow people to rent out rooms in their homes.
But that’s not what Airbnb actually does, does it?
Sure, some people let strangers stay in their spare room for a night, but that’s mostly just desperately broke or head-scratchingly greedy people.
Airbnb’s cash cow is turning family homes into full-time clerkless hotels.
NYC did the math and said enough is enough.
Every full-time Airbnb = a homeless family + increased rent and purchase prices for everyone else
Homed families + more affordability > unearned passive profits to Airbnb’s parasitic shareholders.
So New York laid some ground rules:
Airbnb hosts have to register to rent their places for stays under 30 days.
To qualify, hosts have to live at the rental property during stays and are limited to two guests.
Full-time clerkless hotels where people can ruin the neighborhood = illegal.
As a result, thousands of units are about to flood back onto the rental and sale markets.
Airbnb, naturally, took democracy to court, claiming that the new law was a “de facto ban” on its business.
Don’t miss the sickening duplicity of these corporate monsters.
They tell the public “we help you make more money by renting your spare rooms,” when in reality the real business model is devouring homes.
More than half of Airbnb’s NYC revenue reportedly came from illegal listings (think: owner not present). Over half of hosts have multiple listings.
By taking millions of units off the market and financializing them, Airbnb creates a housing shortage, increases homelessness, drives up house and rent prices, and costs the commons tens of billions of dollars… all so they can send a few hundred million in profits to rich people who don’t create any new useable value for society.
In other words: They’re parasites.
Mercifully, people are realizing this fact.
The judge rightly threw out Airbnb’s case.
NYC isn’t the only city shining a light on the vampires that are blood-sucking their cities dry.
Memphis now requires short-term rental licenses.
Dallas started limiting short-term rentals to specific neighborhoods earlier this summer and it wiped out half the listings.
LA’s short-term rental crackdown has sunk listings by 70%.
It’s a start.
But it’s part of a bigger problem: room-renting
Even renting rooms needs to be banned, because room-renting drives up rent and purchase prices.
If someone wants to buy a home for their family, and another person wants to buy the house to rent out rooms, the latter person can afford to bid higher for the house. Everyone except the greedy investor loses.
That’s part of an even bigger problem: the commercialization of shelter.
We need to ban all for-profit land-lording, not just short-term room rentals.
Why?
Because hoarding houses to extract rent adds zero new wealth to society and it impoverishes the working contributor class to enrich the asset-monopolizing class.
In other words, it financializes a human necessity.
For-profit land-lording guarantees rent and house prices will be higher than they would be without commercialization. It also guarantees homelessness — after all, nearly every real estate investor in the world will tolerate a 2–10% vacancy rate if it optimizes rental profits.
Want to know why everything costs so much? Because you’re paying hundreds of land-lorders every single day.
Stop. Think about it. Understand that sentence before moving on. Picture going out to dinner and a movie. Now do the math on how many land-lorders you’re enriching despite the fact that they neither grew/cooked the food or made the movie.
That’s part of an even bigger problem: rent-seeking
For-profit land-lording itself is just one of the many forms of rent-seeking activity that plague the West.
Instead of creating new wealth by producing actual useable goods and assets, investors have decided to simply bid up the price of current assets, hoard them, and then rent them back to the working class at elevated rates. They then use their profits to repeat the cycle, which is why rents and prices never go down and consistently go up.
Think reforming Airbnb is a start? Let’s keep going until all rent-seeking activity is completely banned and/or taxed out of existence.
Particularly interest. I won’t go into it here (we’ve talked about it before) but interest is just legalized theft. It’s immoral, non-contributive, and it destroys society. It’s the highest form of rent-seeking — of monopolizing an asset to milk undeserved gains at the expense of others — and we need to eradicate it.
That’s part of an even bigger problem: Human greed.
The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
People love money because of the power it wields over others.
It’s our most godlike drug.
We can’t ban greed or legislate the human heart, but we can absolutely put safeguards in place so people can’t physically act on their most predatory desires.
We do this all the time:
Rapists get locked in prison.
Murderers go to supermaxes.
Inside traders… go to Congress. (Looking at you, Nancy Pelosi.)
Right now, society makes it easy for people to exercise their greed muscles.
Unearned dividends from passively owning stocks are taxed at a lower percentage than people who spend blood, sweat, and tears to actually contribute new wealth to society.
Land-lorders get to write off their mortgage interest, while tenants have to pay their rent in post-tax dollars.
Unearned capital gains from real estate appreciation get taxed at a lower rate than the working tenants who increased the value of a property by giving it a cashflow.
Clearly, we have work to do.
Luckily, people are waking up.
They’re beginning to understand that for-profit land-lording, rent-seeking, and interest are theft, and that Gordon Gekko was wrong: greed isn’t good.
Homo sapiens became the apex species on planet Earth because we worked together as communities, not because we exploited each other and ground the real economy to dust. Whenever rent-seekers stepped out of line, the people responded — Rome fell, America staged a revolution, French aristocrats lost their heads.
Democracy just forced reform on a major international corporation. We can now take steps to ascend the ladder:
If the majority has the will, we can demolish Airbnb.
We can ban the commercialization of shelter.
We can tax rent-seeking out of existence.
We can make interest illegal again.
And we can start collectively processing our hearts, our greed, our thirst for money, and our insatiable desire for power and control over others.
The people have spoken.
Death to the corporatocracy.
Long live democracy.
God save the human heart.
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