Visitors spend far more per day than long-term residents. I think there's a high likelihood that their overall contribution to the taxbase greatly exceeds the long-term residents per day of occupancy.
In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident.
As for stability, I don't think we're in any danger of destabilizing major cities from lack of long-term residents.
>>certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel
This should be decided by the contract you signed with your condo association when you purchased the property, not an arbitrary intervention in private contracts and property by the city.
Also, would it make any difference to you if the steady rotation of guests were not paying? If not, why not make the rule focused on the problematic condition, which is a large number of different people visiting/staying, rather than whether there was financial compensation?
It wouldn't matter if it was the condo across the hall or the house across the street. Just because you own a piece of property doesn't give you the right to do anything you want with it.
That's why we don't allow strip clubs next to schools. Because certain things should be in certain places and not others.
In this case, the people have stated by voting in representatives who've appointed officials who've created zoning laws that they don't want short term leasing without a permit in their residential neighborhoods.
And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.
Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.
It's poor exercise of government power to prohibit a money-making operation, as a way to stop a subset of that money-making operation that has harmful effects. Better to target the harmful activity directly.
>>And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.
That's a different topic. My point was that there's no good reason to assume long term residents contribute more to the tax base, given how much more tourists spend per day of occupancy.
But to your point: who said Airbnb means dodging luxury taxes? And why ignore the loss in tourism when you wipe out the low-cost accommodations market provided by home-sharing?
>>Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.
Remuneration from paying guests is not the only potential motivation for allowing a large number of people to stay at one's place in quick succession. The motivation should not be relevant if the problem is the quantity of people staying. Targeting remnunerated stays exclusively is biased.
When you bought a residential property, you agreed to operate it within certain levels of upkeep, within residential zoning ordinances, adhering to a list of rules the city imposes on you. You didn't settle a piece of land on some unclaimed frontier, and you don't get to change the rules your building, neighborhood, community, city, state, or country imposes on your property just because you don't like them. If you wanted to operate a hotel, buy property zoned for that purpose.
Good point. There is a case that house-use restrictions are consistent with voluntaryism given land is not man-made movable property. The community at large could reasonably argue it has a greater right to govern immovable natural property than the first person to homestead it, given the latter is not an act of creation the way the genesis of other types of private property is.
Anyway aside from the larger political question, I think it's more practical to leave these decisions to individual condo associations. No need to homogenize policy in a diverse landscape.
In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident.
As for stability, I don't think we're in any danger of destabilizing major cities from lack of long-term residents.
>>certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel
This should be decided by the contract you signed with your condo association when you purchased the property, not an arbitrary intervention in private contracts and property by the city.
Also, would it make any difference to you if the steady rotation of guests were not paying? If not, why not make the rule focused on the problematic condition, which is a large number of different people visiting/staying, rather than whether there was financial compensation?