It seems to me that this change will have unintended effects and will fail to produce the desired results.
AFAIK rent in NYC hasn’t gone down since they changed their short-term rental regulations.
I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand?
Genuinely curious about others’ takes on this.
Demand for tourist housing is probably a bit more elastic than for residential housing, so it'll probably help a bit, but in general, I agree that growing the pie is better than bitter fights over how to cut the pie up.
This would rapidly double the population of the city which would cause tons of businesses to move there to hire everyone and then commercial real estate would skyrocket. At the end of the day, the city would be twice as large and more overcrowded than ever. Sure, they'd be more efficient in terms of infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, transit) but rents would skyrocket to capture that extra efficiency for landlords.
I have heard that "everyone" would move to
* San Francisco
* Bend, Oregon
* Boulder, Colorado
* Seattle
* Austin, Texas
* New York City
* Santa Barbara, California
* Hawaii
* Montana
* and on and on and on
You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New York or Bend or San Francisco. Building more housing keeps rents in check. And if some more people get to live in a place they want to be, that is a good thing.