Key facts:
* 10% of the users are offering more than one unit (so not just a spare bed)
* Average user rents out 1.3 units
* Top user is renting out 44 flats
https://www.city-wohnen.de/ https://www.thehomelike.com/?lang=en http://en.coming-home.org/index.php?l=en https://www.crocodilian.de/
Good luck with the search!
Edit: actually, we've changed the title to that of the article itself, in accordance with the HN guidelines. Submitters: it's against the rules here to rewrite a title except when it is misleading or linkbait, so please only do so in those cases.
TL;DR they're also placing tight ceilings on new development.
[1] This article is supportive but seems oblivious to the supply-side effects.
Like this guy, just a day ago, where someone made a fake listing for his house and they won't answer him. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/4h5yo0/fl_some...
Maybe it's the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Or it's just the New Economy. Twitter has 2300 employees. Microsoft, hardly the picture of perfect customer service, has almost 120,000. Guess which one you can get on the phone.
You can't get valuations of millions of dollars per employee if you have employees trying to do things like answer complaints. Dealing with complaints is money-losing business, not money-making business.
Meanwhile many fewer homes are being built. The largest drop has been in building by local authorities, which used to account for almost half of all new builds before Thatcher brought things to a halt in in the 1980's by selling off social housing and preventing councils from investing the proceeds. (See: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n01/james-meek/where-will-we-live)
As real wages have stagnated for most people, multiple administrations have propped up demand through ever inflating house prices. People feel richer when their home goes up in value but this wealth is illusory, nothing new has been created, only a generational shift in capital as young people are forced to fork out ever more of their income in rent.
Let’s look at one of those deals in detail.
In 2004, Frank McCourt sold 23 acres of open
parking lots on the South Boston waterfront to
News Corp. for $145 million ... Two years later,
News Corp. sold the same land ... to Morgan
Stanley for $204 million. ... When the
BRA [Boston Redevelopment Authority] approved
the Seaport Square Master Plan, paving the way
for major development of midsize towers in 2010,
the land finally had real value. ... To limit
speculating, the BRA could have made Morgan
Stanley’s Seaport approvals non-transferrable.
But it didn’t.
Instead, over the next five years, Morgan Stanley
parceled out its 23 ... acres ... for a total
of $654 million. ...
After changing so many hands, ... housing, like
at Waterside Place, where a 598-square-foot
one-bedroom can be all yours for $2,685 per month.
When the people who are engaging in housing development are shaping policy to maximize short term profit, this is the result.
I don't have a clear understanding of how to prevent this from happening but my strong suspicion is that better government regulation needs to be in place that holds the public interest at heart.
Disclaimer: I live in the Boston area.
[1] http://www.bostonmagazine.com/property/article/2016/02/21/bo...
Not in SF. If you don't occupy the place you short-term rent, during the time you rent it, you may only legally rent it for 90 days per year. What's more, if the place you rent is covered by rent stabilization, it is illegal to make more in rent per month than you pay to your landlord each month. That is to say that you can only legally cover rent through short-term rentals; you may not turn a profit.
> However, in an earthquake-zone (which I recall California is), isn't it risky to build skyscrapers and other large structures?
The Transamerica Pyramid [0] (and every other skyscraper in FiDi) survived the 1989 earthquake. So, I'mma say "No, not significantly more risky." :)
For a more recent example, the Salesforce Tower [1] is (reportedly) well under way to completion.
This could be compared a bit to gentrification, in which I am reminded of Gertrude Stein's phrase "there is no there there" as well as, albiet more distantly, Marc Auge's concept of nonplaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein#.22There_is_no_...
Most buyers of such property (whether private or investment funds like Deka-Immobilien or BlackRock Global Property or Brookfield Property Partner or one of the many others) do this as an investment vehicle with a particular risk/reward structure. They will absolutely have to rent out these properties, and indeed, when they fund property construction projects, as they have been on a massive scale in London in the last decade, they do so to cash in on rent.