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Nancy Solomon: It's The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm WNYC reporter Nancy Solomon, filling in for Brian who's out today, and now to close the show, a segment about the new short-term rental regulations going into effect September 5th. The relationship between Airbnb and the city of New York has long been contentious. Many homeowners and landlords have benefited from offering rooms or entire apartments for short-term stays. Traditional hotels and housing advocates have been against it from the start, and now the city is cracking down.

At the beginning of September, new regulations go into effect on how and when short-term rentals happen. Here to take us through these regulations and the impact they're already having is Cara Eisenpress, senior tech reporter at Crain's New York. Cara, welcome.

Cara Eisenpress: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on.

Nancy Solomon: Listeners, are you an Airbnb host that's applied for registration? How's that going? Are you someone who lives in a building where apartments have been used for short-term rentals? What do you think about that? Do you still plan on offering a room in your apartment on Airbnb or a similar platform now that these regulations have gone into effect? Call us and tell us about it. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or text that number, and we'll read your text on the air. Cara, walk us through the new laws and this regulation and what's going to happen with short-term rentals that this goes into effect in September.

Cara Eisenpress: Sure. I think that this is coming a little bit as a surprise to people because it almost feels like the boy who cried wolf. There's been a lot going on between New York City and short-term rental posts and platforms for basically as long as they've been operating here. What's happening now is that based on a law that passed, the city council, I think it was late 2020 or early 2021. Anyone who wants to receive payment for hosting has to have registered their unit with the city, and so the idea is that the platforms actually can't process a payment for a unit if it isn't registered.

What that ends up doing is enforcing a whole lot of other laws and bits of a very complex city housing code that aren't new but that are finally able to be enforced, and so on September 5th, which is actually a delay first from, I believe, May 5th and then July 5th, anyone who wants to stay in a unit in New York City will have really a much more limited set of units to choose from as of August 14th. 10 days ago, only 199 units had successfully completed the application process, so someone who goes on Airbnb and is used to seeing maybe thousands, tens of thousands of places that they might be able to book, will now see only 200.

Nancy Solomon: Tell me a little more about this because I'm a little confused. How is it that by requiring this registration, they're able to then put a layer of all these other regulations into place that's slowing down the ability of people to register and become Airbnb hosts?

Cara Eisenpress: Sure. The law that the city council passed said that anyone registering had to comply with New York City's Housing Code. Here's one thing from New York City Housing Code, is that you can only have a certain number of unrelated adults living in an apartment. Here's another thing, you can't rent an apartment for fewer than 30 days. You're supposed to be having long-term tenants in every unit. Those are not new laws, but up until now, many Airbnb hosts either didn't know about them or they knew about them and it didn't matter because there was really no way or no good way for those laws to be enforced.

You might say, "Well, I have this nice two-bedroom apartment and I have to be in Los Angeles for work for the month of January, and I'm going to rent out my whole apartment on a short-term rental platform maybe to two different people for two weeks each," and you would list it for those dates and you could get paid for those dates, right?

Nancy Solomon: Yes.

Cara Eisenpress: You were never really allowed to do that, at least since, I believe, 2010, and now you really can't do it because Airbnb won't list your unit anymore and many of the other short-term rental platforms had already stopped listing most of their New York City units. Go ahead.

Nancy Solomon: It's hard to register because that's what puts you in front of the city with all of the ways that you're breaking the law, it become apparent. That's where it connects up with all the regulations, is that once you go to register.

Cara Eisenpress: Exactly.

Nancy Solomon: Okay, I get it.

Cara Eisenpress: If you went to register that unit, it wouldn't pass registration. The one kind of unit that will tend to pass is if you have an extra room in your apartment. Your roommate moved out, you still hold the lease and you want to rent out that room for shorter periods and not put somebody new on the lease, provided that you can check all of the boxes, that is a legal use of short-term rental platforms.

Nancy Solomon: Okay. All right, let's take a call. We have Jack in Manhattan on the line. Hello, Jack.

Jack: Oh, hi. Thank you. Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Nancy Solomon: Sure.

Jack: Talking to somebody about why normal New Yorkers should support Airbnb is the prices for rooms. Before Airbnb, you couldn't get a room for less than $100 or $150 a night, and now that we have Airbnb, you can get one for $40 or $50. Not Manhattan maybe but pretty close. If you're moving out of the city, like a lot of people do, and you want to come back and visit, it's prohibitive for a lot of people. The other thing that I guess you were saying is that you used to be able to sublet for two weeks or three weeks when you went away and now you can't do that.

That's another reason why New Yorkers should support Airbnb, and also, most of the 80% of the listings on Airbnb are not really active. They're just people that rent from time to time. To me, it's very, very strange. Yes, that's about it.

Nancy Solomon: Better for tourism and for people to be able to visit Manhattan if the regulations aren't so strict, I think would sum it up, but Cara, there's a lot of housing advocates out there who say that Airbnb and other short-term rentals are really contributing to the housing crisis, right?

Cara Eisenpress: People say that. What's behind the serious regulation of the short-term housing platforms is a little bit beyond what I've reported on. I think people who feel that they are doing this in a sustainable way wonder if the hotel industry is behind this or certain other advocates of affordable housing. Honestly, I don't think we're really going to know exactly the effect on the city until we watch the results in the coming months. Some of the housing lawyers I've spoken to said, "Yes, we'll be looking to see if there's an effect on rents or vacancies. We'll be looking to see if hotel occupancy is going up, or hotel prices per room, if they're going up or down."

It feels a little late in some ways to play a blame game, but I do think that there are people on both sides of the issue who have very valid concerns about how it will change their lives, their neighborhoods, and their experience of coming to New York City. One thing that the caller I think hinted at but didn't mention outright is that there are plenty of neighborhoods in New York City, especially in Northern Manhattan and the outer boroughs where there aren't very many hotels and so people who come to visit families go to family events possibly visiting doctors or nurses, or medical fellows want to be in these very particular neighborhoods near a hospital or near their family.

It is in those places where you probably wouldn't be able to find a full apartment to stay in, although you very well may continue to be able to find those $40 rooms. There are about, the last I checked, I think on that same August 14th number, there were over 2,000 units who had registered. That's nearly half of the active and frequently booked legal listings by the best data accounts that I've seen, which is a site called Inside Airbnb that tracks the industry. Basically, it's quite possible that nearly all of the truly legal units may end up successfully registering. We'll have to see.

Nancy Solomon: What did you think about what Jack had to say about the benefit to tourism in New York? Does your reporting support that?

Cara Eisenpress: Again, I think it points to those outer borough neighborhoods again. Bedford-Stuyvesant is a place where there aren't great hotel options. Downtown Brooklyn or Brooklyn Heights has some of the closest not motel-type places, although there are some, I guess, B&Bs that are operating legally. I do think that that has an effect. If I were coming to visit family in Brooklyn and my only option was a $300-a-night Downtown Brooklyn hotel and then I have to hop on a couple of subway stops, yes, I mean, I might not come as frequently.

I think families with kids or people who are traveling in multi-generational families, with grandparents coming or aunts and uncles, and they want to be under one roof so they can cook a little, I do think that those types of visitors in those types of neighborhoods could rethink. It's important to note that tourism in New York, it certainly looks busy in Midtown, but it is not fully back from the doldrums of 2020. The hotel occupancy rate in June was about 85%, whereas it was around 90%, 91% in June of 2019. Pedestrian count in Times Square, which is a pretty good metric for tourism, is only about 80% of what it was in July and August of 2019. There's definitely a ways to go, regardless of the Airbnb challenge. I do think that that will be an interesting one to watch.

Nancy Solomon: All right, let's take another call. We have Evadney in Brooklyn. You're on the line.

Evadney: Good morning. I should [unintelligible 00:13:09]. [laughs] I'm so confused. I was confused from the time they started anti-Airbnb conversation because I thought we were living in a New York state with a whole New York state enterprise initiative for business. I also thought we were living, unfortunately, in a situation where people weren't able to make ends meet, and mortgage foreclosure crisis, all of this stuff. What happened to pro-people? Then I thought we were living in a neighborhood of New York City, all the boroughs, where a hotel stay, two days and three nights, equals 47 hours.

I just can't imagine that a 24-hour day times three would be 47 hours. You can't check in until after 2:00 and you have to check out by 11:00. I do know it's the hotel industry and the agenda makers who are behind this. As a tax preparer, people were also complaining early on people are living in subsidized housing and they're renting rooms out, okay, but Airbnb gives you a 1099, so when you recertify, you're phasing out of your subsidy, paying more for your own rent because your income is now higher. Why don't we not understand it?

As long as the landlord of an apartment complex doesn't have a problem with you subletting or sharing in your lease, that should be fine. People are followers a lot of times, rather than leaders. They react, rather than make clear decisions with information. It's unfortunate.

Nancy Solomon: It sounds like you didn't-- maybe not a question there, but not happy with these new regulations. Anything you want to respond to in that, Cara?

Cara Eisenpress: Well, I think certainly, people who have made hosting on the short-term rental platforms part of their economic life in New York, this pulled the rug out from under them. I think there's no question of that. I found it particularly with owners of one and two-family homes, again, often in the outer boroughs, people who meet somewhere around the median household income in New York City, $80,000 or so, but they bought their homes, and they may be struggling to make their mortgage payments, or they may have bought their homes with, let's say, having in mind that their extended family comes one week a month or a couple of weeks a quarter.

They don't want to lease a unit out for a long-term regular tenant, they want to keep it, so they use some Airbnb, and having that Airbnb money is able to help them make their whole financial picture work. I think that group of people certainly stands to really feel the loss of this income strain. They are organizing, in particular, one and two-unit homeowners because I think they feel that maybe they shouldn't be classed in the same way as a building with dozens or hundreds of units.

Nancy Solomon: I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there, Cara.

Cara Eisenpress: I think that's something to follow.

Nancy Solomon: Yes. Thanks so much, Cara Eisenpress, senior tech reporter at Crain's New York. Her latest piece is titled Airbnb Alternatives Try to Work Around New City Rules. Cara, thanks so much for joining us.

Cara Eisenpress: Thank you for having me.

Nancy Solomon: Thanks everybody for calling in. I'm Nancy Solomon, and this is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.

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