Is there any policy solution to housing issues in touristy areas?

[eschaton]

I think we're all well-aware of the dynamic that happens in an area once it becomes a tourist draw, but to broadly summarize, housing demand gets sopped up by the following:

1. Short-term rental housing, whether hotels, airbnbs, or something similar.

2. Second/third homes for the upper middle and upper class occupied for only a fraction of a year.

3. To a lesser extent, quite often retirees and remote workers with capital who can afford to live anywhere, but don't really work locally.

This creates really bad dynamics for the local housing market, because the tourist draw creates a ton of local employment, and those generally low-paid service workers cannot afford to live in the touristy areas. In urban areas, or in isolated touristy towns surrounded by unfashionable zones, this isn't as big of an issue, because commuting is an option. However, that isn't always the case, which is why in some cases (like say the Colorado ski resorts, or Martha's Vineyard) unconventional housing situations where the employer provides for housing are common.

While increasing housing supply is a pretty clear way to deal with affordability in general, I'm left wondering if it would ever matter in some of these places without regulation. Like, if you take a place like Jackson Hole, WY, and just slap down 1,000 apartment units, would most of the units end up being Airbnb units regardless of the original intention? Is it even possible to flood the market in touristy areas with so much supply that it stops being attractive as a tourist destination?

[Crawford]

You can ban (or strictly regulate) AirBnB and build copious amounts of workforce housing. But in the end, somewhere like Jackson Hole isn't going to be affordable for most.

In the Hamptons, a lot of employers provide housing, bc otherwise, it's unworkable. The line cooks at a Hamptons restaurant or hotel are commonly housed by employer.

[mrnyc]

when i was about thisclose to working in the hamptons out of college, i was told the help lives in bridgehampton. also, a lot of rentals are for 3/4 of the year as they can jack it up in the summer, so they suggest you move into long island during the summer lol. thats what turned me off.

[iheartthed]

For vacation towns like the Hamptons, Vail, Jackson Hole, etc., they'll figure out a solution when they are not able to attract workers. For larger cities, the solution is regulation. New York City has gone more extreme than most places by banning most types of short-term rentals in residential areas, so that's a solution. Other potential solutions are to limit the number of short-term rentals that a person or entity can operate instead of a complete ban, or to limit the amount of time that a unit/property can be used for short-term rentals.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

For vacation towns like the Hamptons, Vail, Jackson Hole, etc., they'll figure out a solution when they are not able to attract workers. For larger cities, the solution is regulation. New York City has gone more extreme than most places by banning most types of short-term rentals in residential areas, so that's a solution. Other potential solutions are to limit the number of short-term rentals that a person or entity can operate instead of a complete ban, or to limit the amount of time that a unit/property can be used for short-term rentals.

What NYC did was asinine. Our hotel prices are through the roof because of it, as they essentially have a monopoly on short term stays.
It has to do with DeBlasio and the hotel lobby, who were the largest donor to his "presidential run".

Be it AirBnBs, hotels, or timeshares, the solution is basically to build housing and flood the market. At some point it will be a race to the bottom as the margins get eroded and competed away and even airbnbs would not make financial sense. The only winners would be the consumer.
Places like the Hamptons, Vail, Jackson Hole want to be somewhat exclusive and unaffordable, that is a feature, not a bug.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Gantz

What NYC did was asinine. Our hotel prices are through the roof because of it, as they essentially have a monopoly on short term stays.
It has to do with DeBlasio and the hotel lobby, who were the largest donor to his "presidential run".

They mostly just updated laws that had been on the books for a century to force the rental platforms to help with compliance. I agree with what the city did for rental units because the de-centralized hotels were on the verge of getting out of control. But I don't really care what people do with privately owned apartment units. I think that should be between the unit owners and the condo/co-op boards.

[pdxtex]

I always thought big companies that own huge, singular assets like a ski mountain should consider some type of worker housing. A dorm for lift operators and cooks. That type of work seems seasonal in many spots. Not all of these places are the same tho. Bend, Oregon is a good example. Its got a ski hill but its also got a diversified economy so there's actually non hospitality commerce. I think topography is the main encumbrance to affordability. If 50 percent of your economy is related to a ski hill and your quaint town is rammed into a mountainous Valley, affordability was probably out the barn door the moment some lady opened her crystal shop.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

But I don't really care what people do with privately owned apartment units. I think that should be between the unit owners and the condo/co-op boards.

What condo/co-op board would ever want to allow short term rentals, and all of their potential headaches?

When a unit in our 3-flat was for sale a couple years ago, the selling agent asked us if our condo bylaws allowed short-term rentals or not, to which we replied "the bylaws don't currently say anything about short-term rentals, but if the issue were to ever come up, the other two unit owners would 1,000% vote to have the bylaws changed to prevent such from occurring".

Oh damn, a realtor lost a potential sale.

[craigs]

Lake Tahoe is suffering a severe affordability crisis. Local government has been going after the Airbnb/short term home rentals, but so far that hasn't made a significant impact. Every now and then a market or some other legacy business closes because there are not enough workers to keep the lights on.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

What condo/co-op board would ever want to allow short term rentals, and all of their potential headaches?

When a unit in our 3-flat was for sale a couple years ago, the selling agent asked us if our condo bylaws allowed short-term rentals or not, to which we replied "the bylaws don't currently say anything about short-term rentals, but if the issue were to ever come up, the other two unit owners would 1,000% vote to have the bylaws changed to prevent such from occurring".

Oh damn, a realtor lost a potential sale.

Some co-ops in NYC did allow short term rentals before the ban in their bylaws. That is why NYC had to ban it outright, to prop up hotels.
Those apartments were perfectly legitimate.

At least in NYC, some of these buildings are rented out anyway, and owners do not live there or don't really care. A co-op that used to allow AirBnBs had higher property values. The downside is that these buildings do not qualify for a traditional mortgage from a bank, but a lot of buyers in NYC are all cash and bank rules can be ignored. Some co-ops had a charge for AirBnBs, where some of the revenue would go to the co-op and offset maintenance charges. That is how they could placate long term residents of the building.

Same thing with condo buildings. A lot of condos in NYC and Miami are not occupied full time, and they had short term occupancy in their bylaws. Now, there are empty condo buildings in NYC that can't be rented out and tourists have to pay $400 a night for a NYC hotel monopoly instead. The hotels simply couldn't compete with those high end condo towers in Manhattan, so they used regulatory capture instead.

[3rd&Brown]

Originally Posted by Gantz

What NYC did was asinine. Our hotel prices are through the roof because of it, as they essentially have a monopoly on short term stays.
It has to do with DeBlasio and the hotel lobby, who were the largest donor to his "presidential run".

Be it AirBnBs, hotels, or timeshares, the solution is basically to build housing and flood the market. At some point it will be a race to the bottom as the margins get eroded and competed away and even airbnbs would not make financial sense. The only winners would be the consumer.
Places like the Hamptons, Vail, Jackson Hole want to be somewhat exclusive and unaffordable, that is a feature, not a bug.

This. The AirBnB ban in NYC was never about housing. It was always about protecting the hotel industry.

On the other hand, Palm Springs recently banned AirBnb and that's an entirely different scenario. It's a low density high demand area and the prices were OUT OF CONTROL in the entire Coachella Valley. The ban on AirBnB has provided immediate relief for area residents.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by 3rd&Brown

This. The AirBnB ban in NYC was never about housing. It was always about protecting the hotel industry.

On the other hand, Palm Springs recently banned AirBnb and that's an entirely different scenario. It's a low density high demand area and the prices were OUT OF CONTROL in the entire Coachella Valley. The ban on AirBnB has provided immediate relief for area residents.

Yeah, IMHO airbnb capture is a bigger issue in smaller cities where most units are in single-family houses. While short-term rental in big cities can cut the amount of housing for homeowners and tenants, causing the price to be jacked up, large metros, high density, and diffuse demand for airbnbs means it won't really dominate anywhere. In contrast, if you have something like say the French Quarter in Nola, there's always gonna be way more people interested in visiting than living there, so it's going to be damn hard to not have airbnb occupy a progressively higher proportion of the finite number of units.

[202_Cyclist]

My mom lives in Sun Valley, Idaho. Housing has become so expensive that a lot of the workers commute from Twin Falls, about 80 miles south.

Ketchum, Idaho, Has Plenty of Available Jobs, but Workers Can’t Afford Housing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ketchum...ng-11625659200

[dave8721]

There are regular buses every half hour that run from Homestead into the Florida Keys to bring all the workers in to the Keys that can't afford to live there. Pretty much every employee you run into at a restaurant or hotel in the Keys (especially from Marathon-north) lives on the mainland and commutes.

[Cirrus]

We could try building enough hotel rooms for the tourists, and enough homes for the people who want to live there.

All of these problems stem from the same basic issue: Decades of laws that prevent supply from meeting demand. Well they worked. What did anybody expect?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

We could try building enough hotel rooms for the tourists, and enough homes for the people who want to live there.

All of these problems stem from the same basic issue: Decades of laws that prevent supply from meeting demand. Well they worked. What did anybody expect?

So funny.

So true.

So sad.




America is dumb.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Gantz

Some co-ops in NYC did allow short term rentals before the ban in their bylaws.

Why?

Who would want to live in a building that doubles as a hotel?

I don't get it.

[Gordo]

It's less about who would want to live there, but who would want to own the units. I've got a friend who owns a unit in Seattle that he rents out (not short term for him), and his building actually voted to enshrine the rights of owners to use short term rentals simply because most of the owners were folks that eventually saw themselves moving and/or potentially renting units out. Banning would have decreased the value of their own units as well.

Now...I wouldn't want to live in a building that doubled that way...

[craigs]

I would never want to live in a multi-unit building where it was unclear who the hell was inside the building at any given time. Airbnb renters generally don't get vetted like tenants regularly do.

[craigs]

The only time we got an Airbnb was in West Seattle, in 2017. The building was new, on a hill, and had three levels. We rented the second and third floors. The downstairs tenants (they were actual tenants) angrily charged up to our door and confronted us about noise. The two of us were literally eating at the kitchen table with the television on mute with closed-captioning. When presented with reality, they defended the confrontation by saying we were walking around too much. It was ridiculous. Never did that again.