For starters: Occupational safety (branches falling down and crushing you on a tire swing), fire safety, bedbugs, noise/loud parties, litter, criminal occupancy, secondary vice (drug dens/prostitution/craigslist orgies/etc). The problem of a bunch of sailors coming into port has been recognized since antiquity. Skeezy/short term motels have a reputation for a reason, and are regulated for even better ones. You yourself may be a perfectly upstanding citizen who just couchsurfs for a weekend to check out a cool area, but others are not.
It's unreasonable to expect neighbors to file daily lawsuits against their neighbors to keep a modicum of peace. It's a known problem and it's perfectly reasonable to preempt it by either requiring a formal lease with a minimum term of a month or more, or requiring more identification/scrutiny of the clients and some formal standards of the rentiers.
Analogously, it's perfectly fine for banks to scrutinize large cash transactions. Some of them are legit, some of them are tied to crime. But you need to look and be sure because it's high-risk activity. If you don't want that level of scrutiny, send a check/transfer/CC payment and your reputation will speak for itself.
Since we are regulating what people do in the privacy of their own bedroom, shall we also bring up the possibility of homosexuals engage in sodomy?
If that's somehow off limits to regulate, what distinguishes it from the private bedroom activities you bring up?
Search 'airbnb xxx fest evicted' for details.
First, nothing you listed is an externality but rather direct results of poor behavior. An externality would be something like 'decreases property values of neighboring properties' or 'increased rents due to lower supply'.
Second, what data do you have that proves these scenarios are more likely in an AirBnB than a long term tenant? You're only supporting evidence is inference; if people are going to behave poorly then it makes sense for them to rent an AirBnB away from home. But there's an easy counter argument: pressure from neighbors will keep these incidents to a minimum. Sure, there will always be hosts are not sensitive to neighborhood pressure, but that same logic can be applied to long term tenants who have bedbugs, throw parties with loud music, litter, engage in criminal activity, etc. Simply put, all of negative scenarios you outline can occur with long term or short term tenants, and there is no evidence that these behaviors are more common from short term tenants.
Third, comparing all AirBnB's to skeezy motels is like saying all restaurants are roach-infested mold-filled 50-point scoring health hazards. This is a classic straw man argument. What about Marriot or Hilton? Embassy Suites or DoubleTree? Do they fulfill the reputation of "skeezy/short term motels"? This is an argument for better inspections and code enforcement, not prohibiting AirBnB.
No one expects neighbors to file daily lawsuits, but neighbors can notify the police if there is a noise violation, etc. Once again, there is no difference here between long term and short term rentals. AirBnB requires more identification than any hotel I've stayed at, so this argument actually supports AirBnB as a platform.
Lastly, your bank analogy is frightfully off base. First, a bank's intrinsic motivation for monitoring large transactions is fraud and not criminal activity. Second, banks are compelled by law to monitor and report specific types of activities that are likely to be criminal activity, but this is defined by organizations like the FBI, not the banks themselves. Third, you still have yet to prove, beyond casual inference, that AirBnB promotes criminal activity any more than long term tenancy.
Not all restaurants are roach-infested mold-filled hazards - but we have to treat them all like they potentially are, in the sense that we need to register them and inspect them to prove that they aren't hazards. Marriott and Hilton hotels get inspected all the time and they pass with flying colors because they do all the things they're supposed to do - unlike unregistered fly-by-night flophouses working under the radar.
You've obviously never gotten bedbugs from a neighboring unit or hotel. Trust me, they suck like crazy. You do not want to go bundle everything you own into trash bags, move out for a weekend while you wash everything you own, and have the house fumigated (heated to a crisp). It sucks.
Fraud/money laundering is a form of criminal activity, and (just like hotels) banks are compelled to report on specific types of activities that are likely to be criminal. Hotels don't define this; legislatures do, just as they define (or delegate) what they consider to be suspicious financial activity. The Hilton is not deciding that the guy paying in cash every night with a dozen visitors every night or the guy bringing in a bunch of drain cleaner every day is a suspicious individual, they let the FBI investigate that just like financial crime.
Sorry to break it to you but the FBI is on to your no-tell-motel dealing scheme. They're not stupid.
The amount of off-campus housing needs increased dramatically through the 2000s as the universities expanded enrolment so many areas that weren't being rented now were. Many of the long time homeowners who lived in those areas long before student housing came there have been up in arms.
Think if you started a bakery and went through the laborious process of getting a business license, getting your kitchen health inspected and certified, etc. and then a week later someone next door just started selling bread out of their home to undercut you on price, regulations be damned. I would be rightly pissed off and expect the local government to shut down the home operation.
Commenters who want to ignore externalities are Randians with no actual sense of human society. All they see are rules that are in their own personal way, naturally some tyranny or another. Democracy itself is a blight in their eyes, and a business plan should always trump community concerns.
