AirBnB Crackdown in NYC Seems to Have Backfired

The numbers: One year after New York City’s passage of short-term rental regulations, which were aimed at bringing down housing and hotel prices, average hotel prices have gone up 7.4%. (Marginal Revolution)

• Nationally, average hotel prices have only risen by 2.1%.

• Rent prices in the first 11 months of the law’s existence increased 3.4%.

The context: Lawmakers blamed the Big Apple’s housing shortages and an affordability crisis on short-term rentals facilitated by companies like AirBnb and VRBO.

Bubba’s Two Cents

Financial Times data reporter John Burn-Murdoch has made a pretty compelling case that a major contributor to the housing affordability crisis in cities like San Francisco and New York has to do with burdensome restrictions making it hard to build enough homes. So maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising that NYC piling on even more regulations hasn’t done much to fix the problem.