In fact, last night the board of supervisors voted on the initiative to make Airbnb official in its home city with some regulations designed primarily to prevent people from using their apartments and houses as permanent rentals –along with other controls such as Airbnb hosts registering with the city for a $50 fee.
"I think Airbnb would be well served to negotiate a workable, enforceable compromise" to curb "the most egregious excesses that result in the loss of permanent, affordable rental housing stock," he said.
The concern in red-hot San Francisco housing market is that this law is abused and landlords will take their units off the market to convert them into tenancies-in-common or permanent Airbnb rentals.
"It's clearly a self-created emergency generated by an effort to close the Bellevue shelter to make way for a private real estate development," he said, and asked why the money to create a new shelter was not used instead for permanent housing or rental subsidies.
The city's soon-to-be six-person department can only reactively respond to neighbor complaints in order to protect housing from being lost to permanent short-term rentals.
In doing so, they are filling the grey area between Craigslist and Airbnb, serving the needs of individuals looking for something more permanent than a vacation rental yet more transient than a typically longer lease commitment.
Movies will only be available for digital rental, not permanent downloads, based on company's observations of demand at other websites based on the DVD-equivalent prices studios offer.
(In the case of the Chelsea, the short term rewards are potentially even greater, as they can turn permanent housing into nightly rental units).
The pitch comes in new state legislation, Assembly Bill 3171, which would require local governments to match the state dollars, resulting in $3 billion to fund homeless shelters, rental assistance, permanent housing and other efforts.
