It’s been a year since New York state enacted a law banning most short-term apartment rentals on platforms like Airbnb. Since then, the number of stays under 30 days in the city has plummeted, but Airbnb has questioned whether lawmakers’ stated goals of lowering rents and opening up apartments to full-time residents have been achieved.
Airbnb has fought New York’s Local Law 18 in court, calling it a “de facto ban,” but failed to block it. Now the company is asking New York state to reconsider. In a recent post, the company said the law’s results are “as expected”: rents remain high in New York City, housing availability is low, and hotel rates have risen slightly. “The data shows the law isn’t working,” Theo Jedinski, Airbnb’s vice president of public policy, told WIRED. “We think we’re asking for fairly reasonable, sensible changes.”
The law allows people to rent out a room in their home to two guests for stays of less than 30 nights, and requires hosts to register their apartment with the city. For stays of less than 30 nights, hosts must be at home. (Apartments and entire homes can still be found on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, but only for stays of 30 nights or more.) Jedinski says Airbnb is calling on New York to lift restrictions that allow people to rent out their entire home for short-term absences and that don’t allow interior doors to be locked for stays of less than 30 nights.
When New York passed the law, many saw it as a test case for measures to curb short-term rentals. Other cities around the world are grappling with ways to regulate rentals that can lead to noise and parties and risk losing housing to tourists to locals. (In 2022, there were more apartments listed on Airbnb in New York than were available for long-term rental. Many of those listings were illegal, but the city had no enforcement mechanism until last year.) Barcelona went further than New York this summer, announcing a total ban on short-term rentals in the city starting in late 2028.
Opponents of the law say the regulations are burdensome and prevent large property owners, as well as many single- and two-family homeowners, from earning extra income to supplement their housing costs. In the days after the law took effect, the number of short-term rentals on Airbnb fell by 15,000, a drop of nearly 70 percent. The impact is most pronounced outside of Manhattan: in some surrounding neighborhoods, the number of short-term rentals has fallen by 90 percent since the law took effect, according to data analytics firm AirDNA.
In New York, there were just over 5,000 short-term rentals listed on Airbnb as of July, but more than 32,000 available for stays of 30 nights or more, according to Inside Airbnb, a housing advocacy group that tracks Airbnb. These figures suggest that many of the short-term stays are not being converted into yearly leases and are instead being listed on Airbnb for medium-term stays.
