Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion" era.
It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.
Getting a taxi in my college town in 2005 was agony. Make a phone call from a loud bar and shout at some guy who can barely tell what you're saying that you want a taxi and then maybe if you're lucky they show up in an hour and cost 3 times as much as you expected (and that's on a good night!) vs. "press a button, get a ride" (and have a feedback mechanism for horrible drivers or gross cars, etc.).
Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
Sure, but there's a difference between "that kind of success" and "any success". To illustrate, imagine an alternate timeline with a company called "Rebu", which provides all the same phone-apps and servers and whatnot for thousands of taxi-services across the world to adopt, replacing their shitty old "computerized dispatch" systems.
Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features?
I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
I think you're missing a key bit: taxi companies weren't interested in this sort of thing. In most municipalities, taxi service was a protected, government-granted monopoly. The reason taxi service was always so bad was because there was no competition, and no incentive to improve.
So why would they bother to adopt "Rebu"? It's nothing but downsides: their taxi drivers have to work harder, have to be more polite and drive more safely, have to have cleaner cars, and have to be more accountable in general. Not to mention of course Rebu is going to take a cut of all rides booked on their platform.
There was no way to make regular taxi service better without structural and legal reform that the incumbents did not want. The only way to fix it was to go outside the system and do something sketchy. And it worked! For all their issues and controversies, the ride-hailing app experience is amazing, especially when compared to old-school taxi service. Some legacy taxi services have stepped up and improved a bunch since then, and others have just faded into obscurity.
I think the difference between the hypothetical Rebu and Uber is one wants to fix the system, and one wants to be the system. The Taxis had to be disrupted, but Uber doesn't flinch at being just as bad wherever they can get away with it
I'm confused to the argument you're making as some of those are clearly ethically-problematic for Uber while legal challenges, government lobbying seems core to the business.
The taxi market, in the US at least, was a textbook case of regulatory capture to stifle competition. Google "taxi medallion prices nyc" for an example. Uber was clearly the 'good guy' in flouting those laws and later getting them repealed. The cartels that controlled the medallions had no interest in improving the technology until they had competition.
You're right, but you're treating that as a net-negative. The reality is that the government regulations structured taxi services in most cities in the world into cartels that operated in a way that was to the detriment of their customers. Uber broke the taxi cartel, and yes, it broke the law to do it, but it wouldn't have been possible to do this way if they'd tried to work with the existing taxi companies, because their anti-customer cancer would have infected Uber while it was young and before it could even scale. Part of their value proposition is their scale, itself.
Services like Uber and AirBnB have also introduced a concept through technology that was previously almost unheard of in the private sector: a nationwide blacklist.
Bob Smith annoyed enough Uber drivers in Milwaukee that now he can't get a ride in Poughkeepsie. Maybe that's valid, maybe it's not. But it is pretty new, and I doubt it was in the slide deck when Uber hit up the VCs.
The social aspect of these sorts of things can't help but get entangled with the politics of social mores. Maybe Bob was giving the Uber drivers wet willies. A lot of people would think he caught that ban fairly. Maybe Bob was too politically incorrect for the Uber drivers. Not quite so sure he deserves to be sentenced to hoof it until the Sun burns out. How do we know the bans are of the fair former and not the latter? We don't. It's a private company, they can be as opaque about this as they want.
Good, bad, who knows, but it certainly makes for a completely different landscape.
I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but it's not a fundamental problem with the existence of these services. It's just a problem to be solved, perhaps through legislation on how suspensions and bans are allowed to work, and how people ought to be able to appeal them.
The legacy taxi services had this problem too, though, as you note, not on a global level. Pre-Uber, there was one taxi service that stopped taking my calls. I have no idea why. I had no way to appeal this, or to even get in touch with them to find out what was going on.
In the meantime, Bob still probably has public transit or local old-school taxi services to fall back on (which somehow still exist). Many areas even have local ride-hailing apps. Worst-case, Bob will have to rent a car when visiting other cities.
>I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but it's not a fundamental problem with the existence of these services.
Well, it kinda is a fundamental problem, with regard to the original article's premise that scale is a problem. These services can't operate on VC's terms without scaling up to a national or global level. And this, by its nature, means your Uber problem in California follows you to Georgia, and possibly to Uzbekistan.
What if Uber shares its ban list with Toasttab? Or if Uber buys Toasttab?
Laws may be able to address this, but laws always lag. Sometimes by a lot.
this is still the experience in less developed places like italy
It’s more about regulations rather than development. It’s forbidden here, so taxi drivers can still make a good living rather than subsidizing a billion dollar company
It's a better experience for sure, and that's why they got the viral start that gave them the opportunity to eat the world, but presenting that as "worth it" seems pretty dubious considering:
- Tons and tons of users buying vehicles they can barely afford to drive for them
- Tons of restaurants already struggling to get by saddled with needing an iPad or two at their counter to intercept online orders, and needing to charge more and anger customers just to break even on the fees
- Huge amounts of sexual assaults because Uber didn't vet drivers
And lest we leave it merely implied: Uber is worth what Uber is worth because it's a taxi company that owns no Taxis and pays no taxi drivers a proper wage. That's why it's a billion dollar unicorn. Same as AirBNB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels, UberEats/Doordash are food delivery services that don't own restaurants, Instacart is a grocery chain that doesn't own grocery stores.
Honestly if you want to really be cynical about it, the true path to finding the next tech unicorn is figuring out how to be a $business that owns none of what a $business normally does, and hires no employees that $business usually does, and then wrap that up in an app, and convince poor people to do the work for you because they have no other options. Boom, unicorn.
The way taxi companies had languished in obsolescence was definitely a problem, but I struggle to consider if Uber was the best way to solve that on any front.
Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary US business is about value extraction not value creation.
Put differently, a common business model in late 20th century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a transaction that is already happening "at scale" and figure out how to insert your own company into the transaction and extract some percentage of the value.
The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for whatever you bring to it.
This does not mean that there is no value added. What these companies do not represent are new transactions: no new products, no new macro-scale services ("but you get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to "someone will drive you where you want to go").
> Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary US business is about value extraction not value creation.
I wouldn't even say it's isolated to businesses anymore. This is the same economic forces that's prompting all the crypto nonsense from a few years back, bullshit businesses like drop-shipping, social media influencers, etc. There's just nothing left to build anymore it seems. Every industry is stagnating, year over year there's no crazy new innovations anymore, nothing to get excited about. Just dumber and thinner versions of things we already had.
The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete.
Er no, they totally transformed things through technology as well. Their product was fantastic. Hail a cab in the 2000s in the UK and tell me Uber had no improvement for its customers.
I understand GP's point, but to yours I'll add they have also open sourced and mainstreamed some of their key technologies. So it's not all bad.
Not all bad != good.
Right but how much of this improvement came from the invention and popularity of smartphones and how much of the innovation came from a company called Uber.
Struggling to see the relevance of this question. How much of Uber's "innovation" was actually Ford/GM/Toyota innovation in car manufacturing?
But those car companies are just riding on the coattails of Exxon, Chevron and the like with their improvements in oil discovery and hydraulic fracking.
Pretty hard for me to lament laws being broken when the laws boil down to "you're not allowed to compete with this monopoly".
Do you lament e.g. Uber knowingly breaking laws, and then in the knowledge that they are knowingly breaking laws and under scrutiny for doing so, also actively building functionality into their systems that helps them criminally evade scrutiny?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
This is a level of deliberate, optional fraud that goes a step beyond, is it not? It's organised crime.
No, I don't care about that at all. Why do you care?
Someone, generations ago, made a law saying people in your town could only solicit car rides if they paid a special tax, and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model.
State-enforced monopolies are often legalized corruption. I care more about that than some corporation using their resources to break that corruption.
> Someone, generations ago, made a law saying people in your town could only solicit car rides if they paid a special tax, and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model.
Congratulations on a text book case of Chesterton's Fence [0]. You've mischaracterized the purpose and nature of the law.
1. we have cars, we have people willing to drive them around to take people places
2. we want some regulation of this new business/service, to make things safer for the riders
3. we want some regulation of this new business/service because otherwise competition will force the price so low that nobody can make a living offering to do this (and we consider the service valuable).
So, we introduce a scheme which says you have pay for a license in order to provide this service. This creates driver identity and "responsibility" which we want for riders. We limit the number of licenses so that we do not have too many drivers chasing too few riders, and thus offering a more reliable income to the drivers, ensuring that the service remains available.
[ time passes ]
Uber introduces a scheme in which there is almost no floor to what drivers might be paid, but manages to tell a story that convinces enough people that they could make a living or at least a significant amount of extra cash by driving without the required license. Uber also assures riders that even though there is no official license, their technology can provide the driver identity/responsibility that it offered.
Result: better ride hailing for riders, money for Uber, and a steady, constant turnover of drivers "just giving it a try because I heard you can do really well ..."
As usual, a mixture of pros and cons, which vary depending on which perspective you are taking and your moral/political philosophy.
> Why do you care?
Not OP, but I believe in the rule of law, and in a republic governed by elected officials.
It's not OK for powerful actors, especially companies, billionaires, and government officials, to willingly and knowingly break the law.
Thank you. I do generally agree with you.
In this particular example with Uber, I see "powerful actors" many decades ago breaking our social contract by using the force of the government to implement a monopoly for their own profit and everyone else's expense. Legal, yes, in the strictest sense of the word, but certainly against what I value about my particular republic (USA).
So Uber here is more "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" than a company I actually admire.
> and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model.
This is a bit of projection. But good for you, being open about your support for fraud :-)
Sure, that's bad. But that has nothing to do with the fact of their existence.
Laws aren't universally good. Some laws are bought and paid for by special interests. Some regulations are the result of regulatory capture. I am totally fine with people or companies skirting our outright breaking those laws in order to make things better for people.
But yes, Uber also did some bad things that I don't agree with. I still think Uber has been a new positive for my life, and I'm happy they exist.
One labeling is "organised crime".
Another is: civil disobedience with a profit motive.
Eh. If they break laws to bust the monopolies, more power to them.
I do so love the HN culture that laws are for little people.
Uber was the little person when they started out, busting those monopolies.
They should absolutely be held to a higher standard today, now that they are more or less one of those monopolies.
I'm not sure if this counts as being "empowered to be more productive", but both Airbnb and Uber are (to me, at least) still miles ahead of what were the only options pre-Airbnb and pre-Uber.
The hotel experience of course was (and is) not universally bad, but I still prefer an Airbnb in most cases, for most trips I take. And when it comes to taxis... no thanks. Unless I have foreknowledge that taxis are significantly cheaper than Uber/Lyft in a place I'm visiting, I will take that Uber/Lyft every single time.
Airbnb is certainly more fraught, given the problems for communities that rampant short-term rentals can cause. And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are. Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents. "Social expectations" is a bit of a weird thing to bring up, since it's so amorphous and hard to pin down. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that people can't rent out their house or apartment for a few days or a week. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that the only way to hire a car was to call a number that often doesn't pick up, and then wait 30-60 minutes for a car that often doesn't ever arrive.
> And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are.
"Technology and throw-caution-to-the-wind made life better for me as a consumer, and I openly don't care (much) about the negative impacts on communities and other individuals".
> Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents.
Certainly. That's why we have a process to change them, rather than simply ignore them.
it was social cocaine, a lot of shiny results that made a lot of people high on numbers and progress fantasy
old is new, 2.0
> we've been throwing cash
I think you find most of the answer you want if you simply examine who "we" is in this context.
It certainly wasn't "us."
That’s a pretty good point.
Are there any, at least somewhat credible, unicorns that have appeared over the last 5 years?
Does OpenAI count? Founded 8 years ago, but have completely blown up in the last couple years.
Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and local government policy had not already guaranteed those outcomes.
Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up.
This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.
The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
AirBnB destroyed home ownership?
As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans.
AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more.
BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
> AirBnB destroyed home ownership?
What I said was rather more specifically qualified than that.
> Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up.
The thing that's "ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership" is the incapacity of the community, "where they were brought up", to actually change and accommodate increasing demands.
In reality these individuals from these communities are using Left rhetoric to advocate an extremely conservative position. That is for the community to remain as is, in the exact way such people were "brought up", such that no progress, no change, no additional value is added to the communities.
What ends up happening because of this confused policy is that the individuals in these communities both lose out on their hometown, the community ends up changing, and it becomes impossibly expensive for everyone in the community. IE the worst of all options.
Instead. Build more. Build vertically. Build better infrastructure. Provide for local residents an opportunity to "buy-in".
This kind of cloaked conservatism, masquerading itself using leftist rhetoric ends up being confused from a policy POV.
Lots of assumptions buried in here.
There are rural/tourist-dependent communities that had an adequate supply of housing when the only visitor accomodation was licensed as a hotel/motel/inn/B&B/hostel. They didn't need a lot of extra, but some slack to accomodate tourist season workers, and occasional new arrivals.
Then AirBnB came along and converted not just the slack, but some residential property that would otherwise have been available for long term lease, into much more profitable short term rentals.
Income at licensed residential stays sometimes drops; short term and long term housing options either vanish or are reduced; problems begin to occur that were not present before.
None of this is in any way dependent on the failures caused by zoning, permitting and housing policy.
This story has been repeated at tourist locations across the world.
AirBnB was fundamentally a message to anyone with residential property: you can make more money with it as a short term rental than via any other use. This is why in many locations we've seen new construction of residential property intended solely for short term rentals. Nobody wanted to build that stuff when it was only going to be LTR; AirBnB changed the game.
As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic.
I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.
> because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb
Unless you were the very first person in the entire area to think to do so, then the existence of that very market for you to rent spare rooms on is actually driving up the prices of properties so you have to do so.
It's also driving up the prices of long term rental, because landlords make more money in the short-term rental market. The prices of long-term rental also affect the floor price of permanent ownership.
> As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic.
Then you're a landlord who has purchased more of a scarce resource than they require (a house larger than you need) who has then turned around and rented access to the extra you have to people who can't afford a home of their own, and in so doing have driven the cost of homeowner-ship just slightly higher, which was the reason you couldn't afford it in the first place. Repeat that a few thousand times and that's a huge contributing factor to why housing is in such a dire state here.
You haven't solved anything. You just went from being an exploited person to being an exploiter instead, taking advantage of people you should have solidarity with and inflicting the harm the system was inflicting on you, onto them instead. The system will continue feasting on people who can't manage the same as you did, and you now posses wealth you did not earn.
Homes on the market aren't infinitely customizable. It seems perfectly likely that GP would have been happy to buy a home with exactly the amount of space they needed, but such a home was not available at a price they could pay. (Maybe they settled for a slightly less-nice neighborhood, or a slightly less-nice house, that just happened to provide an extra room or two.)
Even if that wasn't the case, I don't see a problem with buying slightly larger than is necessary, because (for example) perhaps they're planning to have a couple kids in the next few years, but will rent out the extra space until then. Moving is transactionally expensive, and expecting someone to move every few years as their space needs change is unreasonable.
Regardless, you seem a bit overly judgmental about this entire situation, and about someone you don't know at all.
You need to really distinguish between rent seeking landowners, and value add landowners.
Landowners that have made improvements to the land and seek financial compensation for those improvements, in this case in the form of providing a service, is NOT rent seeking behavior.
That is NOT exploitation.
This is even basic economics from an extremely leftist POV, where those that have added labor value, that is improvements to the land, in this case providing a service and perhaps building a unit, managing them, etc. should be compensated for their labor.
Like this is extremely basic stuff.
> You need to really distinguish between rent seeking landowners, and value add landowners.
No, I don't. Rent-seeking is derided behavior by basically everyone who isn't rent-seeking.
If you buy property, improve it, and sell it, there's your profit for providing that service. No ethical lapse whatsoever, unless you used that godawful gray laminate that every flipper uses. Then I'm mad at you still but that's a different reason.
If you own a thing that people need, and you gate access to it behind a paywall while maintaining ownership, and extract value from those people so they may use it but retain full ownership and control of it, that's rent-seeking and it sucks. You're the economic version of wind drag.
Yes, that includes the 98 year old lady who rents out a room to fill the gaps left by social security to the nice young man who's going to college in the area. Still value extraction. That young man is losing the value of his labor because he has to live somewhere and she has space he can live in. That's unethical.
> godawful gray laminate
dude! godawful gray granite or go home :)
You need to explain why AirBnB did this as opposed to other factors. Renting your house out predates AirBnB.
I need to?
Thanks for the unnecessary correction, when it's pretty clear that my comment you are replying to includes the words "even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business".
I don't know why it did not happen before.
All I know is that the situation in coastal resort towns in Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere in the UK changed utterly when Airbnb became a thing.
I could guess that barrier to entry was always an issue before then; the relative complexity and process involved in listing a property with e.g. Hoseasons, who were the dominant player in the 80s and 90s, and who inspected properties and had greater requirements.
But either way, Airbnb did unambiguously change things. Ask people who lived in Cornish towns whether they're even able to rent a room or a flat.
I mean, usually if thing popular, make more of thing until everyone can have it? I guess we could go with your solution of deliberately killing demand with bizarre mechanisms so only a few people can enjoy a holiday instead of pointing the blame where it demands: locals fighting tooth and nail to not build more.
Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. After all, it's the only solution if you don't primarily place the blame on lack of construction.
> make more of thing until everyone can have it?
There are literal physical limits on this in many coastal villages and towns -- for example pick almost anywhere on the south west coast of the UK. Not only is the area on which houses can be built restrictive due to geography (and often geology), the transport infrastructure does not scale. New property building both has not caught up with, and probably cannot catch up with, short term demand.
As it happens, a collapse seems likely, because local sentiment is turning against them so fast and because of general economic weakness; the number of "thriving holiday let" properties that are on the market now suggests that Airbnb's own accelerating rental costs problem is going to cause a bit of a bust.
But that bust will not benefit most of the people in the areas affected where the price of a small house is twenty to thirty times the average salary of would-be-first-time-buyers. Those people are leaving, so there will instead be a ghost town. And the sheer number of residents who are temporary has destroyed the potential for long-term stable infrastructure businesses for residents.
> Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise.
It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. They can no longer afford the houses at the prices at which they will be built and the rates at which they can be.
> It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards.
NIMBYs are property owners who vote for restrictive housing development policy in order to prop up their own home values.
Eliminate the NIMBYs and you end up with a lot more people who can have their own backyard.
Don't have to be property owners. Anyone who can show up at a meeting, vote, submit comments ...
AirBnB rentals are not making it criminal to build supply, local zoning regulations that benefit incumbents at the expense of everyone else are what make it criminal to build supply.
It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property ownership, and democracy.
What do you think would happen if you filled a cozy touristic town with skyscrapers?
> Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people
That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have accelerated the issue rather than caused it.
> Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.
Honestly I'm not convinced when an airbnb is cheaper to me than renting some other place. It even includes furniture!
Oh please. NIMBYs ruined home ownership. Airbnb certainly hasn't had zero contribution to higher home prices, but abolishing short-term rentals hasn't fixed affordability issues anywhere it's been done.
AirBnB has been shown to raise residential house prices.
It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
> It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-term rentals will not move the needle on housing affordability.
It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%, and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
When I read stuff like this, I'm left wondering if I'm the only person who actually lives in a place that has been infested with Airbnb. On paper, my neighborhood is the Hacker News dreamland. Nobody has a yard. There is train service. Many people don't have cars. There is no mandatory parking allowance. There is no zoning restriction against multifamily housing. Virtually every unit is at least attached. Multi-use is fine. Plenty of buildings contain both housing and businesses. There isn't a lot of traffic. It's walkable. The only major restriction is you can't build higher than five stories. And we've been in a construction boom for nearly a decade.
But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra.
With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
That should drive your property value down, not up.
Not until there are so many short-term rentals that they aren't profitable anymore
If anything, there is a housing cartel that we need an Uber-like blitz (times a million) to destroy. In the same way that Uber ignored local taxi regulations, you would need to ignore local zoning regulations. Just "build, baby, build", become valuable, and then, with your fait-accompli in hand, bribe the various local governments -- just like Uber.
Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
Sure, but if someone started running heavy industrial concrete equipment in a residential zoned block 24/7, than the city wouldn't be blaming poor people for the issues.
The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services running out of residential zoned homes.
Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer" convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
Yeah I'm tired of this too. Real estate hyperinflation is almost entirely the fault of chronically under-building real estate due to regulatory capture by landlords, legacy homeowners, and speculators. The real estate market is more or less a cartel in quite a few places.
AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but only because supply is so absurdly tight.
You can define it as under-building, but that's only one side of the political effect. E.g. the UK net immigration rate has been pretty enormous, and it seems lopsided to call it under-building to have not built homes for a giant number of people coming from their previous homes elsewhere in the world to the UK.
Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant, for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I am doing the same.
Underutilization of land as a result on speculation on the growth of land prices is a major reason, even Manhattan has massive chunks of real estate that are vacant, a land value tax would fix this.
most of these are legal immigrants, so the country decided to accept them, and yet failed to build enough to keep up with demand that they allowed.
100% of code uses 100% of resources. Let's not downplay the role of Airbnb as both a company and a phenomena for causing inflation. But more than that, remember that a lot happens at the margins in these markets: what's actually liquid or in play is a small part of the overall stock. So anything that messes with that will have an outsized effect.
One of the questions all this raises for me is: what fraction of successful startups actually make society better?
I'm sure to get pushback here, but my suspicion is: most do not. Looking at companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, I'm kind of think they made it worse. Yeah, I know, some people benefited. But net-net, I preferred having more and better bookstores to Amazon. I don't like what google has become at all. And Facebook has never been good.
I'm halfway through reading this and still not discovered what the point is.
I like Airbnb, because it's made staying abroad much cheaper and nicer. I also like being able to rent a taxi on an app in a new town.
For awhile I'd been using AirBnb by reflex, but after a few pretty bad experiences I started indexing it against local hotels before committing, and my experience has been that if you just need a place to be (don't care about kitchen) then AirBnB is not nearly as competitive as it used to be. So yes, AirBnB has made staying places cheaper, but the industry is also catching up. Concrete example is nightly rate for a studio in Paris vs the hotel next to it were +/- euros difference when I was there last year.
I misread the title as "Scala Ruins Everything" and was very confused by the comments.
So did I and having chosen it once, I still thought "well, I'll hear this out..."
Any advance, early industrial revolution; late nineteenth century industrialization; twentieth century vertical integration; globalization; internet disintermediation etc. will cause some dislocation. Often unintended, and rarely foreseen. Ultimately it all settles down to a new equilibrium, until the next perturbation. It's a bit disingenuous blaming VC's, or scale, or anything exogenous. The system's capacity for change will always outstrip the current institutions' abilities to fully buffer the change. If we focused on improving the institutions responsible for that function we'd be performing a more useful function than trying to limit the change.
Odd piece. It highlights some hyper-scalers but it needs to work on justifying 'how they ruin everything'.
"At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually undermine democracy itself."
Uh what now?
airbnb, doordash, airbnb, facebook - did those things, respectively, with plenty of hard evidence (does anyone still remember cambridge analytica)
To be honest, you could say this about capitalism in general. Everything has to be huge no matter what industry it's in or what the product is, just because shareholders demand that impossible infinite growth.
Human nature in most big culture seems to be trained to demand more (even if not always money). If there was any group of people that were "content with what they had", they were outpaced in development by the ones that "want more" so there will be minor (or inexistent) now.
I do wonder if there is any smart solution to this issue.
It's not capitalism. It's government bonds. If you can get a guaranteed return from bonds, then any risk must beat the bond market. That increases the cost of capital for businesses, so they have to produce greater returns.