News and Commentary

Boston Declares War On Airbnb

   DailyWire.com

The Boston City Council dealt a devastating blow to Airbnb this week by passing new draconian rules that will shut down much of the rapidly growing rental business in the city.

“After months of debate, the Boston City Council on Wednesday passed rules that are designed to sharply rein in Boston’s fast-growing short-term rental business and help ease the tight housing market,” The Boston Globe reports.

The new rules, overwhelmingly passed by the progressive city council, are “among the most stringent efforts in the nation to regulate the burgeoning industry,” the Globe notes. The city will no longer allow investors and tenants to rent their homes by the night through websites like Airbnb. Only “homeowners and owner-occupants of two- and three-family houses” will be allowed to do so.

The rules, which officially go into effect on Jan. 1 but allow for Airbnb providers until Sept. 2019 to shut down their operations, were passed after a three-year study found that this was the best way to “relieve pressure on a housing market where an estimated 2,000 apartments are being rented by the night to tourists, instead of through a traditional 12-month lease,” the Globe explains.

As Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw puts it, “For lower income renters, this outcome represents pretty much the worst case scenario.”

Some earlier proposals under discussion spoke of perhaps limiting the number of nights per year they could rent a room or perhaps even impose some sort of annual fee. But Boston has flat-out banned anyone who doesn’t own the property from earning extra money this way, regardless of what sort of arrangement they may have with their landlord. Similarly, if you are an investor who has a rental property you will not be allowed to rent it out on a nightly basis through the popular gig economy app. Only those who own and reside in a residence will be able to do so, and even then they will be charged an annual fee and have limits placed on rentals.

The city government still laughably claims this is a solution to a housing crisis problem. They say that there isn’t enough rental property available in the city because of all the Airbnb traffic. In reality, too much housing demand is a pretty good problem to have because it means that a lot of people are visiting your city and spending money there.

Progressive Boston’s actions against Airbnb follow a pattern seen in other progressive cities of targeting upstart new businesses like Uber that are making services cheaper for customers and giving more people more ways to make a living.

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