It’s been a year since Modern York City passed a law that bans most short-term apartment rentals on platforms like Airbnb. Since then, the number of stays of less than 30 days in the city has plummeted, but Airbnb has raised questions about whether the lawmakers’ stated goals — lowering rents and making apartments accessible to constant residents — have been achieved.
Airbnb fought Modern York’s Local Law 18 in court, calling it “de facto ban” on the platform, but failed to block it. Now the company is asking Modern York to review the case. In last postthe company called the law’s impact “predictable.” In the city, rental prices remain high and housing availability is low; hotel prices have also increased slightly. “The data shows that the law is not working,” Theo Yedinsky, vice president of public policy at Airbnb, told WIRED. “We’re asking for what I think are pretty reasonable, sensible changes.”
The law only allows people to rent out rooms in their homes to two guests for stays of less than 30 nights, and requires hosts to register their apartments with the city. For stays of less than 30 nights, hosts must be home. (Entire apartments and houses can still be found on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, but they must be rented for 30 nights or longer.) Yedinsky says Airbnb is calling on New York to allow people to rent out their entire primary residence when they’re away from home for short periods of time, and to also reverse an ordinance that requires no locks on interior doors for stays of less than 30 nights.
When New York passed the law, many saw it as a test case for how to curb short-term rentals. Other cities around the world have grappled with the issue of regulating rentals, which can be noisy and party-inducing and can drive residents away from tourists. (In 2022, more apartments were listed on Airbnb than were available for long-term rentals in New York City. Many of those listings were illegal, but the city had no enforcement mechanism until last year.) This summer, Barcelona went even further than New York, announcing that all short-term rentals would be excluded from the city at the end of 2028..
Opponents of the law say the rules are burdensome. They prevent not only large property owners but also many owners of one- and two-family homes from earning extra money to cover their own 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 was most dramatic outside of Manhattan. In some neighborhoods in neighboring counties, the number of short-term rental listings has fallen by 90 percent since the law took effect, according to a data analysis firm. AirDNA.
As of July, there were just over 5,000 short-term rentals listed on Airbnb in Modern York City, but more than 32,000 stays of 30 nights or more were available. Inside Airbnbhousing advocacy group that tracks the platform. That data suggests that many short-term stays haven’t converted into annual leases, but instead remain on Airbnb as medium-term stays.