The Manhattan district seen from the ferry serving Staten Island in New York, May 23, 2023 (GETTY/AFP/Archives/SPENCER PLATT)
If you are trying to rent an apartment for a few days of sightseeing in Brooklyn or Manhattan, you will be surprised how few offers on Airbnb or on the VRBO platform.
The municipality of New York, like Paris, where accommodation is an obstacle course, implemented this week a law which prohibits owners from renting tens of thousands of furnished tourist accommodation for a period of less than 30 days. .
The new legislation – stricter than that of the town hall of Paris where, since 2021, only main residences can be rented freely for a maximum of 120 days a year – authorizes an owner to rent a room in his apartment provided that it is at home throughout the stay.
In addition, tourist tenants cannot be more than two and their room must remain accessible.
Each short-term landlord must register with the town hall and pay a tax of $145 every two years.
– $7,500 fine –
But these rental permits have so far only been granted to barely 10% of candidates.
Fines for illegal rental are already set at between $1,000 and $7,500, but they will only hit owners.
The “Big Apple” has 8.5 million inhabitants — not counting the large residential suburbs — and the housing crisis there is legendary.
In Manhattan, an apartment – from a studio to a four-room apartment – was rented in July at an average monthly price of $5,588 (+9.3% over one year) and in the more fashionable Brooklyn borough, the Average rent reached $4,347 (+11.9% over one year), according to real estate firm Douglas Elliman.
Even if, officially, the left-wing municipality intends to fight against all the nuisances caused in the neighborhoods by short-term rentals, the objective is to encourage a return of housing on the market for leases of one year and more and to perhaps bring prices down a bit.
Which makes Marianne LeNabat, a 44-year-old New Yorker, say that the town hall’s decision “is probably necessary.”
– New York is “unaffordable” –
“Housing is completely unaffordable in New York and (…) taking thousands and thousands of homes off the market (for very short-term rentals) is obviously a problem,” she told AFP. .
New York landlords and Airbnb had long expressed their dissatisfaction.
For the San Francisco-based platform and its director of global strategy, Theo Yedinski, “New York City is sending a very clear message to the millions of potential visitors who will have fewer choices: + You are not welcome +” .
As for small owners, who own one or two homes, the ban on short-term rentals “will jeopardize the ability to repay their mortgages, causing an additional crisis in the housing market, and putting them financially and personally in danger”, according to their association Rhoar.
This is the case of Tricia, who does not want to give her surname, and who, at 63, rents the ground floor of her typical small house in Brooklyn to earn some 3,000 dollars a month on average.
“Almost everyone (in the neighborhood) owns their house and we bought it thinking that we would have the right to do with it what we want”, protests this retiree to AFP while ensuring that she will respect the 30-day minimum rule.
– “Bullet in the foot” –
New York, known as “the city that never sleeps”, recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic after welcoming more than 66 million tourists in 2019 who generated more than $47 billion in turnover. and employs 283,000 people.
But the hotel and restaurant sector is now short of workers, many large establishments have not reopened in Manhattan and room prices are soaring to hundreds of dollars per night.
“There are so many young people visiting New York who can’t afford the hotel,” says Joe McCambley, 66, a regular Airbnb guest, who “thinks New York is shooting itself foot”.
In a report commissioned by Airbnb, a professor at Boston University, Michael Salinger, writes that the new municipal legislation is not “economically justified” and that it will on the contrary be “a big blow to the local economy without addressing New York’s housing shortage.
© 2023 AFP
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