This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.
The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.
As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans.
AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more.
BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
What I said was rather more specifically qualified than that.
Americas are a lot bigger than the USA, and the unicorns had a disruptive effect wider still.
It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property ownership, and democracy.
That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have accelerated the issue rather than caused it.
> Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.
I suspect the real reason owning is cheap is not that it's inherently better, but because everything is cheaper when you have lots of money.
But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra.
With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-term rentals will not move the needle on housing affordability.
It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%, and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/new-nyc-data-shows-th...
Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
Yes, it's a failure of government policy, but I don't think it's hyperbole to say that AirBnB and its ilk destroyed that community. That is, assuming you define "community" as a group of people and not a group of buildings.
it has absolutely done so in the same way that a bunch of motels springing up in your neighborhood would completely change it and not necessarily for the better
it also greatly constrained the availability of housing for locals, therefore pushing up prices, so that people not living in the city could visit for cheaper; probably ok if you're in the tourism business, otherwise not
The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services running out of residential zoned homes.
Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer" convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but only because supply is so absurdly tight.
Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant, for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I am doing the same.
Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
The hotel experience of course was (and is) not universally bad, but I still prefer an Airbnb in most cases, for most trips I take. And when it comes to taxis... no thanks. Unless I have foreknowledge that taxis are significantly cheaper than Uber/Lyft in a place I'm visiting, I will take that Uber/Lyft every single time.
Airbnb is certainly more fraught, given the problems for communities that rampant short-term rentals can cause. And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are. Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents. "Social expectations" is a bit of a weird thing to bring up, since it's so amorphous and hard to pin down. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that people can't rent out their house or apartment for a few days or a week. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that the only way to hire a car was to call a number that often doesn't pick up, and then wait 30-60 minutes for a car that often doesn't ever arrive.
"Technology and throw-caution-to-the-wind made life better for me as a consumer, and I openly don't care (much) about the negative impacts on communities and other individuals".
> Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents.
Certainly. That's why we have a process to change them, rather than simply ignore them.
old is new, 2.0
I think you find most of the answer you want if you simply examine who "we" is in this context.
It certainly wasn't "us."
Are there any, at least somewhat credible, unicorns that have appeared over the last 5 years?
Realistically people were making these kinds of points back in 2015, and now a large percentage of the lists of unicorns were from somewhere around 2015. It just takes time for most of these companies to become well-known unicorns. The last five years is always the worst five years, until you wait another five years and in hindsight consider it a golden era.
Edit: although I do think that the couple years of high interest rates will slow the growth of startups from this era, since it has a meaningful impact on how much cash VCs can spend. The AI boom at the tail end of high interest rates will probably cover a bit of that though; OpenAI is the first runaway success but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the last.
I have thought a lot about antitrust recently and realized that it’s an overlapping problem with the VC unicorn problem. People get so hung up with being bigger/biggest, faster/fastest, that they minimize or ignore pathological side effects.
What if we have a progressive tax structure on business based on scale? Partly on size, partly on market power?
For example, what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served?
These kind of ideas have very low impact at small scales, but after a certain scale they start to have such a huge effect on bottom line that they disincentive growth for its own sake.
And they’re self-regulating and largely objective, unlike our current antitrust laws in the US.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but these are very difficult issues to address.
Is there a reason for choosing those rather than the simpler alternative of the corporate income tax rate increasing progressively with revenue (as it does for individuals)?
Corporate accountants are sophisticated enough to deal with formulae, and small businesses would be unaffected as the function changes very slowly at small numbers so even an error would likely not materially affect your return.
Calculation of market share would be more problematic.
And of course if you don’t like logarithms then choose your favorite exponential function.
Government can then immediately start "mis"-managing the company to make it less profitable (while theoretical profit stays the same)
You would get for example a government google search and a government adsense department.
Absolutely nothing would change except for an increase in paperwork and a few more lawyers.
Unemployment would increase.
>What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served?
More companies would register in Panama or some other tax haven.
I would be wary of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
At the companies that would be affected, they would simply divest. Shareholders would not tolerate the destruction of value so new companies would be created, spinning off parts of the original company (products and employees) into new companies.
In fact employment might increase as these new companies would need administrative functions that were previously shared in the larger original company (HR, accounting, etc)
Maybe I'm just unlucky but the last several times I've traveled, staying at an AirBnB simply made no financial sense. Sometimes I feel like I'm crazy, hearing people talk about "cheaper".
I prefer ordinary hotels nowadays. Especially when travelling with children.
I think it will be like Amazons coming doom, death by a thousand cuts. You can have this horrible model that can't handle edge cases and until you burn too many people, it seems to work. But once you have sold fakes, or ruined (or added thousands in expense) vacations to enough people I know, your business is dead to me.
I do wonder if there is any smart solution to this issue.
The answer is at the beginning of your statement: "human nature".
In plain English: there's no solution to that.
Stop projecting, you two.
Just because you want to take take take from others doesn't mean everyone else is.
I have always wondered how that would apply to software companies though. If you make something that works really well and everyone wants to buy it, you could grow fairly large financially without needing a ton of people if you just focus on that one program that makes you successful. I imagine it's hard to not feel a need to scale up dramatically when you have millions of users/customers asking for new features.
Being private didn't prevent it turning into a monopsony, ironically for the discussion, maybe because its competitors were mostly public companies (and so didn't care enough to do a good job) ?
They are not immune to walled garden issues though (SteamWorks), but maybe their private structure helped enshittification to proceed much slower ?
I'm sure to get pushback here, but my suspicion is: most do not. Looking at companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, I'm kind of think they made it worse. Yeah, I know, some people benefited. But net-net, I preferred having more and better bookstores to Amazon. I don't like what google has become at all. And Facebook has never been good.
Amazon helps us buy anything we want
Facebook helps us keep in touch with all of our friends easily
Their not as good a they used to be but how are they not good?
Amazon inspired us to think we needed more cheap crap in order to inspire us to buy cheap crap that we didn't need. We aren't any happier than we were before we had the ability to buy cheap crap on a whim, but we sure do have a lot more cheap crap than before. That wasn't worth it.
Facebook is essentially as good at helping people keep in touch as any instant messenger that preceded it. But unlike those instant messengers, it's supported by invasive targeted ads, and consult the first paragraph for why this is a negative.
This has all been a waste. Society isn't any better as a result of these companies existing.
I think there's arguments for both sides, but personally I land on the net-evil side for all 3 of the listed companies.
"At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually undermine democracy itself."
Uh what now?
Homeownership rates are almost 66% now in 2024 [1], which is the highest it's been since 2011 [2].
[1] https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...
Has DoorDash put some restaurants out of business, probably. Have they put restaurants out of business, absolutely not.
Has Airbnb raised home prices, yes by around ~1%. Have they destroyed the dream of home ownership, lol no. We're talking about ~$5k on the loan which isn't making or breaking anyone. And claims on destroying communities are dubious because they're just not that dense in places where people actually live.
Has Facebook increased political polarization and sent people down the right-wing pipeline, yep. Would this have happened anyway with a constellation of smaller social media sites, it already has.
I think it's kinda true, but govt regulations should have prevented it, which is not happening anytime soon because politicians act like startups and lobbies act like incubators.
What, have a profitable, efficient business with happy customers and workers? Well, we NEED to see growth, so better find a way to cut the operating costs - no matter how much worse it makes the product, how unhappy the workers are, etc. Better try to capture more of the market even if it makes 0 sense in context and will end up being a massive waste of resources.
It may run the business into the ground, but as long as there's a quarter of growth they can't see anything else.
Where we get into a problem is when, due to lack of competition, you start extracting almost all (or perhaps even somewhat more than all) of the value that you're adding. That leaves everyone else in the same boat they were in before the rental model showed up, except comparatively worse off because there's a ton of wealth in there that has been concentrated in the hands of a few.
This is the kind of thing that having more competition would help with.
Maybe the natural limit to scale should be state sovereignty (i.e. protectionism). I actually believe that consumers benefit if countries ban or tax the likes of Uber and promote a homegrown alternative. (Imagine if each country had its own Google customized to the local language and culture, it might actually be a better experience for everyone). I’ve heard that Baidu and Yandex are better than Google for local content.
Too bad the EU didn’t catch on with this. Europe could’ve outcompeted the US by playing a different game on quality and boutique charm instead of scale. Instead of pathetically trying to become a large homogeneous market like the US (and then failing badly and then regulating “privacy” out of spite), the EU should’ve actually been protectionist in favor of its members and it would’ve been interesting to see what marvels could originate.
Regarding "Facemash":
> Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy. Ultimately the charges were dropped.
Impossible to assess. These things happened, but as a chemistry experiment. You'd need to be some sort of $Diety to track the individiual atoms in the solution and judge the alternatives.
Quit this fruitlessness while you're behind, say I.
This is the actual issue. When ZIRP was introduced (and then RE-introduced, sigh), it makes money appear to be worth almost nothing. Which means everything looks valuable.
i like that phrase. Like black holes' hyper-gravity bending the fabric of space-time..
the article also reminds me of that book "The Limits to Growth" (from the 70ies?)..
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."