While I typically would support a tech company, and this is not to say that I'm not pro-technology and want smarter legislation to keep track with technology advances, the opposition does have some good points.
Having only recently become able to afford my own apartment, it appears to me that this legislation is, at its core, designed for the purpose of renter protection. Housing prices are literally insane in metropolitan areas across America. (LA here). Illegal sublets are already endemic, and were I to own property, or even have a year long lease, the ROI from AirBnBs/subletting would definitely be enticing. I won't assert I'm a moral paragon, but there are many landlords less scrupulous than I am.
The problem is that, with AirBnB and sublets come ever increasing rent, eventually pricing huge numbers of people out, which drives down productivity and growth. Uninhibited illegal sublets/hotels create a weird bubble at the very bottom of the housing market, which serves to exert upward pressure on prices across the board, since if one room is now worth $800-$1000/month, a studio apt jumps from $1100 to $1300, and so on and so forth.
> The problem is that, with AirBnB and sublets come ever increasing rent, eventually pricing huge numbers of people out, which drives down productivity and growth.
AirBnB aside, the cities with the highest housing prices, and the highest recent increases in housing prices, also have the highest economic growth by far.
In theory, people like service workers will be driven out, the local economy will suffer, yadda yadda yadda. In practice, that has never happened. In San Francisco area, for example, rents have more than doubled in the past five years, the economy has boomed, thousands of new jobs were created, and there are still enough service workers, restaurant workers, municipal employees, etc. to do the jobs that need to be done. If you look at the most expensive cities worldwide, e.g. London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, etc., you will find similar situations.
If you want to argue for affordable housing on the basis that it is a social good, that's fine. But there is no evidence that high housing prices have driven down productivity and growth.
Except those service workers probably now have significantly longer commutes. Their quality of life suffers. I don't know how broadly your definition of service workers goes, but this affects teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc.
I don't think the parent poster would disagree with you. What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy.
I already addressed this in my original post. It seems obvious that the displacement of workers would hurt the economy. However, it does not seem to actually happen -- the cities with the highest housing prices have the highest growth of any cities in the world.
> What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. High housing prices don't seem to hurt the economy. Quality of life arguments, whether they are right or wrong, are totally unrelated to that proposition.
The unfortunate thing is that common sense dictates that productivity should be going down with quality of life, but apparently, it isn't. Or at least, nobody has been able to demonstrate a correlation yet.
Quality of life can go down while excess productivity has been captured by corporations and distributed to shareholders.
As productivity went up over the last 40 years, we should've reduced the work week. [1] We didn't. And now we have corporations with trillions of dollars of cash they can't or won't invest [2], and tens of millions of workers who continue to slave away 40 hours a week.
As odbol_'s sibling comment states, most of HN's demographic doesn't see this despair or care.
You're abusing the law of averages though. Yes, productivity might be fine for the most "economically productive" members of society (e.g. programmers, middle managers, aka the privileged.) For everyone else, aka the people on minimum wage, their productivity and quality of life is severely hampered. But since if one janitor is forced to quit their job because the 3-hour commute is no longer worth minimum wage, they can just go find another person desperate enough to work for minimum wage. These people are often ignored and have no real public voice/outlet to let their plights be known. But of course, plenty of rich programmers on a Hacker forum don't think anything's wrong, because nothing's wrong _for them_.
> In San Francisco area, for example, rents have more than doubled in the past five years, [...] and there are still enough service workers, restaurant workers, municipal employees, etc.
> The loss is not to the area. It's to the people who could have gone there, but can't due to housing prices.
Since we are talking about the productivity and economic growth of the area, rather than the salaries and quality of life of people who aren't in the area, how is this relevant?
I see your point but I don't think we have enough data to conclude. SF rents have drastically changed in the last handful of years. Service workers still show up but by forcing them to either pay more for rent in city or forcing them out of the city to cheaper residence their quality of life decreases. Less time with family or less money for family, pick your poison. This is the problem with those service workers in this context.
Someone will always fill the gap though so I suppose my argument doesn't hold much either. If enough service workers leave big cities for cheaper living and shorter commutes these heavily populated areas will have to start paying more to incentivize people to work in downtown areas. So essentially its a supply and demand problem like any other.
Perhaps there is no argument here at all and it just sucks for some people who are less financially well off.
Having only recently become able to afford my own apartment, it appears to me that this legislation is, at its core, designed for the purpose of renter protection. Housing prices are literally insane in metropolitan areas across America. (LA here). Illegal sublets are already endemic, and were I to own property, or even have a year long lease, the ROI from AirBnBs/subletting would definitely be enticing. I won't assert I'm a moral paragon, but there are many landlords less scrupulous than I am.
The problem is that, with AirBnB and sublets come ever increasing rent, eventually pricing huge numbers of people out, which drives down productivity and growth. Uninhibited illegal sublets/hotels create a weird bubble at the very bottom of the housing market, which serves to exert upward pressure on prices across the board, since if one room is now worth $800-$1000/month, a studio apt jumps from $1100 to $1300, and so on and so forth.