You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
Don’t you? I can’t think of any instance of justice truly being served to billionaires, can you?
Comment on How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion
MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They didn’t accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
GrundlButter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
eran_morad@lemmy.world 6 months ago
SBF recently and Madoff before him.
GrundlButter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Those are fair points, but I can’t help but chuckle that they were brought to justice because they stole from millionaires and other billionaires to make their ill gotten gains. Probably woulda got away with it if they just stole from the poor and middle class.
eran_morad@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Is that so for SBF? I genuinely have no idea.
Toes@ani.social 6 months ago
…decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else.
-The American Dream™
shrugs@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They are a company with zero morals and the goal to maximize profits. That’s what capitalism is for and were it’s good at.
The government needs to create rules and laws to make sure that this profit maximizing doesn’t happen on the back of ordinary people, but since corporate america is allowed to control the government through money, this doesn’t happen.
Capitalism is a tool, can we please start to use it like that again?!
MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 6 months ago
the problem is already in the word itself… capitalism
aka to capitalize on someone else’s problems misfortunes
shrugs@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Capitalism is a tool. Without it, we wouldn’t have cars, smartphones and so much more.
The problem is that we started to let the tool decide what is important. And since for them profit is more important then people, we are fucked.
Is a hammer generally bad because it can crush your fingers?
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn’t do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, “fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here.” A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It’s about as fucked as it can get. And when we’ve had a sympathetic council person, they’re immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It’s a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That’s no typo; twenty five percent of our valley’s residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.
frickineh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.
We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.
I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m an activist writing a housing bill to get introduced to my state legislature. Part of it specifically addresses these platforms, but I don’t know what’s been tried against them yet. Any tips?
frickineh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.
It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
cybersin@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Cops would rather beat up college students and the unhoused than go after landlords.
Ah, yes. We don’t have money because collecting taxes would be too expensive. Classic.
frickineh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.
Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.
dezmd@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Not being corrupted is just too darn expensive.
hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Visiting my husband’s home town where this has happened and all his parent’s friends have moved into trailers because the houses where they raised their kids were bought for insane amounts but then they couldn’t afford a smaller house in the same town. Where we live now on the East Coast, we can no longer stay in our school district for less than half a million because doctors from larger urban areas keep buying the houses in our school district and we’re being forced 60+100 miles out from my hometown where we raised our young kids to even begin to afford housing.
PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee 6 months ago
The government just doesn’t work for the people anymore. It works for the donors that fund them.