It’s been a year since New York passed 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 in the city has plummeted, but Airbnb has raised questions about whether lawmakers’ stated goals of lowering rents and opening apartments to full-time residents have been achieved.
Airbnb challenged New York’s Local Law 18 in court, calling it a “de facto ban” on the platform, but failed to block it. Now, the company is asking New York to reconsider. In a recent post, the company called the law’s outcomes “predictable.” In the city, rents remain high and housing availability low; hotel prices have also risen slightly. “The data shows the law is not working,” Theo Yedinsky, Airbnb’s vice president of public policy, told WIRED. “We’re asking for what I think are pretty reasonable, common-sense changes.”
The law only allows people to rent rooms in their homes to two guests for stays under 30 nights, and requires hosts to register their apartments with the city. For stays under 30 nights, hosts must be home. (Entire apartments and homes can still be found on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, but must be rented for 30 nights or longer.) Yedinsky says Airbnb is calling for New York to allow people to rent out their entire primary residences for short-term stays, and to roll back a regulation that requires no locks on interior doors for stays under 30 nights.
When New York passed the law, it was widely seen as a test case for how to rein in short-term rentals. Other cities around the world have struggled with how to regulate rentals, which can bring loud noise and parties and siphon off housing from locals in favor of tourists. (In 2022, there were more apartments listed on Airbnb than there were available for long-term rentals in New York. Many of those listings were illegal, but the city had no enforcement mechanism until last year.) This summer, Barcelona went even further than New York, announcing that all short-term rentals will be banned from the city by the end of 2028.
Opponents of the law say the rules are onerous. They prevent not only mega-renters but also many single- and two-family homeowners from generating additional income to cover their own housing costs. In the days after the law went into effect, the number of short-term rentals on Airbnb fell by 15,000, a nearly 70 percent drop. The impact was most dramatic outside Manhattan. According to data analytics firm AirDNA, the number of short-term rental listings has fallen by 90 percent since the law went into effect.
As of July, there were just over 5,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb in New York City, but more than 32,000 stays were available for 30 or more nights, according to Inside Airbnb, a housing advocacy group that tracks the platform. Those numbers suggest that many short-term rentals haven’t been converted to annual leases, instead remaining listed on Airbnb as mid-term rentals.
