Council Speaker Corey Johnson is vowing to crack down on home-sharing site Airbnb — a favorite foe of the hotels union that helped boost him in the speaker’s race.
“The Council is going to continue to lead on cracking down on illegal hotels and illegal Airbnb warehousing of apartments,” Johnson told the Daily News in an interview, promising to beef up budgets for enforcing existing laws, hold oversight hearings and draft new legislation.
Johnson said the proliferation of illegal listings — it’s against the law in New York to rent an entire apartment out for fewer than 30 days, or even to just advertise it for rent — is one of the biggest complaints his constituents have.
But making an anti-Airbnb push one of his earliest policy proposals is sure to raise some eyebrows from those who might see it as a reward to the Hotel and Motel Trades Council — whose politically influential union is rabidly anti-Airbnb and which helped Johnson become speaker.
4 comments:
Maybe they can get him to lower the hotel tax so that they'll be more competitive with AirBNB.
AirBnB distorts the markets; of course, this is also retaliation because what monopoly wants their pie hemmed in on by little guys? Hotels should stay hotels, apartments should be just apartments, and nothing more. Any arrangements people make should be private, unadvertised, and just between themselves as the owner of a space to a temporary resident; certainly not to the benefit of a renter trying to make a quick buck by sub-letting by another name.
Dumbass mayor needs to kill this 25% hotel room tax. People use airbnb because hotels are too expensive. Most people who use them are on company business. The company pays and writes the $250+ a night off.
In some cases hotels wont even take cash or a debit card, they want a top notch credit card or some kind of NY State ID and EBT voucher this woman with several kids had.
Regular people simply can not afford it, get no breaks and that is why Airbnb is thriving.
Airbnb is great, after all you just need a room, a door, simple bathroom and clean sheets for sleeping if your visiting New York.
This is no-brainer. The donor monetary ties to the hotel industry are obvious but the fact is that if you can't afford to come here, don't come and it's utterly irresponsible to have strangers with their rolling luggage or backpacks coming in your building every 3 or 4 days.
And it's proving to be a criminal enterprise (um, Jona used it for his building and the Blaz got paid to ignore it) as well has a cudgel and causation of gentrification (everywhere in upper north, coastal and now southwest Brooklyn and it's now spreading in Averne in Rockaway). All these bot companies constantly shirk their fiduciary responsibilities to the city and state and act like they're above the law.
I still don't trust Corey, but there is not much of an argument here. Airbnb's got to go.
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