• KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    Everyone who says “ban them” seems like they have never left the US. In Europe and Latin America, there are a ton of other websites that locals use for the same thing. Before the web, you would call up a few places listed in a guidebook and rent it over the phone.

    I dislike Airbnb because it’s expensive. The concept of “renting a room” in a vacation area will never go away. But the idea of $100 cleaning fees, when they just change the sheets and wipe down surfaces (30 minutes total) is dumb.

    • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      We’re no strangers to it in the US as well, but what AirBnB has allowed is an industry of landlords that have strangled the housing stock in a number of places. It’s not the people renting a room in their house that are the issue, it’s the people buying apartments and houses specifically as rental property. I remember seeing a photo of LA that had AirBnB properties marked, and it was estimated at around 45% of all housing as being short-term-only rentals.

      I live in a condo complex of duplexes in a summer vacation spot that has a limit on the number of units that can be rented out specifically to avoid this kind of problem - they want affordable housing for people who are actually living here, and not properties that are going to sit empty 8 months of the year. They don’t care if you rent out a single room or something, but we have a lady who owns a building who doesn’t even live in the same state. She has to drive like 4 hours to get here.