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Airbnb Ruled Illegal In New York City

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Rucksack Brian started this discussion 11 years 6 months ago

A judge in New York recently ruled that AirBnB is now illegal in NYC.

Airbnb, arguably the world’s most popular crowdsourced hospitality site, was ruled illegal in New York City today.
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The company is in violation of New York’s hotel law, which prevents residents from renting out apartments — whether they own or rent them — for less than 29 days.

This is the same law that made hostels illegal in NYC.

According to another report the city hasn’t started a widespread crackdown on AirBnB hosts (yet) but rather they investigate individual homes when a complaint is filed.

Apparently Amsterdam also has a beef with AirBnB. While they didn’t specifically ban AirBnB, they made it clear that renting out your space without a permit is illegal. Officials in Amsterdam are actively seeking out hosts and issuing them fines of 12,000€ for the first offense and 18,500€ for repeat offenders.

Does anyone know if other cities are cracking down on AirBnB hosts?

Many hostels are listed on AirBnB around the world. Presumably, if a host has the proper permits (for example a hostel) then it should be perfectly legal for them to conduct business. A blanketed ban on AirBnB in a city, however, would prevent such legal hosts from doing so.

What do you guys think about this?

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Clayworks Hostel

11 years

Wow! Leave it to NYC to go to that extreme. So I guess it's out with airbnb and in with legalizing hostels for that city. In Austin the city has been cracking down and making homeowners charge hotel tax like all the other legit lodging places, but we have such a shortage of affordable places to stay and so many of our residents have gotten used to the extra airbnb income (or sole income for some) that I think people would be up in arms if that happened here.

I don't know. On one hand, it's not fair to the neighbors who live next to homes where people are coming and going in that way on the other hand, I rented out a home through airbnb for my wedding and was so happy to be able to provide a cheap room in one house for all of my friends coming from out of town.

I had actually been wondering whether hostels listed on airbnb but hadn't gotten around to looking yet.

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