It’s been a year since New York enacted a law banning most short-term rentals of entire apartments on platforms like Airbnb. Since then, the number of stays of less than 30 days has plummeted in the city, but Airbnb is raising questions about whether lawmakers’ stated goals — lowering rents and opening up apartments to full-time residents — have been achieved.
Airbnb fought New York’s Local Law 18 in court, calling it “de facto ban” on the platform, but failed to block it. Now, the company is asking New York to reconsider. In a Recent PostThe company called the law’s results “predictable.” In the city, rent prices remain high and housing availability is low; hotel prices have also seen small increases. “The data shows that the law is not working,” Theo Yedinsky, Airbnb’s vice president of public policy, tells WIRED. “We’re asking for what I think are pretty reasonable and sensible changes.”
The law only allows people to rent out rooms in their homes to two guests for stays of fewer than 30 nights and requires hosts to register their apartments with the city. For stays of fewer than 30 nights, hosts must be home. (Entire apartments and homes can still be found on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, but they must be rented for 30 nights or more.) Yedinsky says Airbnb is asking New York to allow people to rent out their entire primary residence when they are away for short periods of time and to undo a regulation mandating that there be no locks on interior doors for stays of fewer than 30 nights.
When New York passed the law, many considered it a test case for finding ways to control short-term rentals. Other cities around the world have had to grapple with how to regulate rentals, which can lead to noise and parties, and can divert housing from locals to tourists. (In 2022, there were more apartments listed on Airbnb than were available for long-term rental in New York. Many of those listings were illegal, but the city lacked an enforcement mechanism until last year.) This summer, Barcelona went even further than New York, announcing that all short-term rentals would be subject to a ban. Excluded from the city from the end of 2028.
Opponents of the law say the regulations are burdensome. They prevent not only mega-landlords but also many single- and two-family homeowners from generating additional income to offset their own housing expenses. In the days after the law went into effect, the number of short-term rentals on Airbnb dropped by 15,000, a drop of nearly 70 percent. The impact has been most dramatic outside of Manhattan. Some neighborhoods in the surrounding boroughs have seen the number of short-term rental listings drop by 90 percent since the law went into effect, according to data analytics firm airborne DNA.
In July, there were just over 5,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb in New York, but more than 32,000 stays available for 30 nights or more, according to Inside Airbnba housing advocacy group that tracks the platform. Those numbers suggest that many short-term stays have not turned into yearlong rentals, but instead remain on Airbnb as medium-term stays.