- On the Cyclicity of Regional House Prices: New Evidence for U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Michael André Flor & Torben Klarl, CESifo Working Paper Series No. 5471.
- How Mortgage Finance Affects the Urban Landscape, Sewin Chan, Andrew Haughwout & Joseph S. Tracy, FRB of New York Working Paper No. FEDNSR713.
- House-Price Expectations, Alternative Mortgage Products, and Default, Jan K. Brueckner, Paul S. Calem & Leondard I. Nakamura, FRB of Philadelphia Working Paper No. FEDPWP15-1.
- A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Judicial Foreclosure Delay and a Preliminary Look at New Mortgage Servicing Rules, Lawrence R. Cordell & Lauren Lambie-Hanson, FRB of Philadelphia Working Paper No. FEDPWP15-14.
- Sharing Property, Kellen Zale, University of Colorado Law Review (Forthcoming); U of Houston Law Center No. 2015-A-16.
- [Re]Integrating Community Space: The Legal and Social Meanings of Reclaiming Abandoned Space in New York’s Lower East Side, Andrea L. McArdle, 2 Savannah Law Review 247 (2015).
- Bankruptcy Weapons to Terminate a Zombie Mortgage, Andrea J. Boyack & Robert Berger, Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2015.
Tag Archives: Lower East Side
Reiss on Airbnb
MainStreet.com quoted me in Housing Activists Claim Airbnb Cuts Into Affordable Apartment Inventory in Manhattan. The story opens
Popular and trendy neighborhoods in Manhattan accounted for 30% of units booked as private rentals on AirBnB.com, according to information subpoenaed by New York Attorney General (AG) Eric T. Schneiderman that Airbnb fought against releasing.
Those neighborhoods include the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Chelsea, Hells Kitchen, Greenwich Village and SoHo. “Removing rental units from the marketplace by operating them as illegal hotels damages the availability of housing,” said Roxanne Earley, a blogger with the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD).
Another tidbit from the AG’s report based on subpoenaed records is that commercial users of the home-sharing website collected $168 million in rent last year, controlled one in five AirBnb units and one in three bookings. “Although Airbnb is marketing itself as a company that helps the majority of its hosts make some extra money to keep their homes, the reality is that a multi-billion dollar business is helping a small portion of commercial users rake in a disproportionate amount of profit,” Earley told MainStreet.
“The markup on short-term rentals is much higher than that of long-term residential use of apartments and this has resulted in landlords breaking the law and using their units, sometimes whole buildings as illegal hotels,” said Earley.
And that’s eating into affordable housing units that city residents could be living in. “Commercial users earn an incredible markup on short term rentals and take units that may otherwise be affordable off of the market for long term occupancy,” Earley said.
The existence of rent regulation is unique to cities like New York and San Francisco and further complicates the Airbnb factor. Administered by a court or public authority, rent regulation limits the changes in price that can be attached to renting a home, which balances the negotiating power of landlord to tenant.
“If rent regulated apartments become profit-centers, tenants may also be incentivized to hang on to their apartments longer than they would otherwise, negatively impacting the availability of affordable housing for those who would use it purely for their own personal residence,” said David Reiss, professor at Brooklyn Law School.
