And yes, Airbnb is skirting the law in the loaded sense of the term. They basically encourage illegal rentals and then refuse to police them until cities like NYC force them to. They might not be directly in violation of laws themselves, but they're definitely knowingly enabling their customers to do illegal things.
I don't have much of an issue with communities using zoning rules to prevent AirBnBing. That's a separate issue from top-down hotel regulations.
The cost of "protecting" me from hotels is several orders of magnitude higher than the value I get from these "protections". Of course, most of the cost of hotel regulation is hotel taxes (which are big revenue sources for tourist destinations and have nothing to do with hotel safety) and bureaucracy. The claim that all regulations have something to do with safety is popular among proponents of a given regulation, but of course it's manifestly false.
> Safety and health regulations ensure that customers won't get injured or sick during their stay.
I think you're putting a bit too much stock in the effectiveness of regulation; in particular, municipal health authorities taking your money does not make you immune from disease. I'm also quite capable of looking at something and telling if it's dirty, which is the process I use both for my own household and for AirBnBs. It seems to work quite well (and inexpensively).
Have you ever read the analysis Ford Motor Co. did when they were determining the cost of adding a safety feature to the Pinto (it would cost $11 to add a feature to prevent a low speed rear end collisions, as low as 25mile/hr from spraying gas into the passenger cabin and lighting everyone on fire, the total cost of the safety feature for all Pinto's: $140m, the cost of an expected number of 180 deaths, and 180 injury (and resulting law suit payments): $50m). In the absence of regulation or judicial liability (which is also a regulation, but one with more uncertain cost making it harder for businesses to plan for and comply with), companies would make this exact analysis all of the time.
I would assume you would be willing to pay $11 for the safety feature right? Thus, given the asymmetric information that benefits Ford, and prevents consumers from demanding that as a mandatory feature or an "upgrade" option, it seems like an acceptible regulation to impose.
See https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Leg...)
See also https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-metivier/module-2-why-do...
> "I think you are putting too much stock in the effectiveness of regulation..."
Except that clean water regulation very clearly prevents disease. Have you heard of the origin of clean water regulation in London? One researcher traced a cholera epidemic to a single well, city water services and related regulations were a direct result of his effort and advocacy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_ou...
Before that, in 1849, 8,000 people died in NYC from cholera from water: https://dec.alaska.gov/eh/dw/publications/historic.html)
Last time I checked people aren't dying in NYC from unclean water. I am also confident that the utility of 8000 people dying greatly exceeds the cost of providing clean water.
The many extra taxes and tariffs on guests. Occupancy taxes, tourism improvement fees, etc, that the city is only able to capture by abusing its control over the hotels.
It's easy to pass laws that don't affect people who live in your area because nobody is that motivated to stop you. Hotels and other legitimate businesses suffer because the city stole (took because it could, for no good purpose) money from the guests that they'd have otherwise spent on services they actually wanted.
The hotel should only be billed for services delivered. If the guests consume a lot of water the hotel needs to pay for it, etc. If that rate is below cost, it should be raised.
The extra tax is just a "because we can" and is one of the things an efficient economy will route around.
> they're definitely knowingly enabling their customers to do illegal things.
They're enabling a primarily legal operation - people renting things. It's not their job to police which units are legal to rent and which are not.
I could buy legal things at Costco and commit a crime with them and it's not Costco's duty to stop me.
I don't think I have ever seen an example of someone imposing a tax "just because they can". Indeed, there are very real limits, at all levels of government, to the power to levy any tax. While this is a very complicated area of law with a lot of history of debate and change, the basic premise, is that taxes have to be tied to a reasonable social interest (general welfare), can not be arbitrary or capricious or designed to harm a specific party etc. If your state or local community doesn't limit taxing authority, then be part of the change you want and pursue a limit.
It's not hotels the tax hurts, so I don't think they would have advocated very hard. In fact, to the degree that tax pays for anything related (inspections, etc) they would support it as it would externalize their costs.
> I don't think I have ever seen an example of someone imposing a tax "just because they can".
Of course not, but because it reflects positively on them and yet doesn't impact the pocketbooks of their constituents. Which amounts to "because they can."
> If your state or local community doesn't limit taxing authority
Copyright is limited - to any finite duration. So yeah, there are limits. Our goal as a society shouldn't be to tax everything to the limit though, but to cover externalities to avoid burdening others.
In this case the people presumably using the resources (the tourists) are being taxed, but only indirectly on their hotel stay. This unfairly doubly-impacts a local who needs a room and it ignores the usage costs of those tourists who don't stay in a hotel, or rather saddles the hotel using tourist with the RV-tourist's share.
The fact that the tax badly fits the supposed problem is an indication that it's just a cash grab with any justification tacked on.
> then be part of the change you want and pursue a limit.
The "you're in a democracy so it's all your fault" answer. Fwiw, the first step of change is identifying and discussing the issue.
I'm not saying the answer isn't to change broken governments, but first you need to realize that the system exists to produce this state. We didn't end up here by accident and to fix it will require a reasonable alignment of incentives.
And in America, we all are. Taxes taken without representation, for no good purpose, are theft.
Otherwise you'd be good with a 100% tax rate, right?
The way we ensure good laws, and reasonable taxes, is to call out all unreasonable cases.
