Extra housing space is more important for city residents than for tourists.
In vibrant cities like San Francisco and New York where demand for apartments is great and housing arrangements are varied, informal vacation rentals affect the market in different ways. A homeowner occasionally renting out a spare room to tourists in a moderately priced neighborhood will have a different impact than a landlord who is renting out numerous apartments to tourists in a neighborhood with rising rents.
This complexity makes it difficult to create realistic and effective regulations, and the lack of data makes it harder. The type of academic and government data that housing researchers typically rely on doesn’t exist for this issue, and there is a predictable paucity of reliable and current data offered voluntarily by companies like Airbnb.
But we know that the rise of informal vacation rentals in high-demand cities has an impact on housing supply, even if we can’t quantify it perfectly yet. Those cities are experiencing surging competition for housing, and rising prices are only worsened by removing residential units from the market.
Read more in New York Times.
