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Austin to allow more homes on one plot of land in the pursuit of cheaper housing (www.kut.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kalpol to c/austin

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This is one of the more misdirected things the city has done. There are literally rows of empty houses and empty apartments near me that stay permanently empty except some weekends when they are filled with bachekorettes going WOOO at 1 AM.

You can walk down Haskell and see such a row of small apartments, all empty and used strictly for STRs.

And the removal of occupation limits hamstrings one of the only tools holding the AirBNB owners accountable, not that they care much about fines anyway.

The STR issue is rapidly killing our neighborhoods, and now there will just be more.

Here is data if you don't believe me.

http://insideairbnb.com/austin/

Also people are doing this anyway, just building sheds from scrap lumber and running an extension cord to them and renting them out. Code doesn't seem to care, so how could this ever go wrong?

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[–] kalpol 1 points 1 year ago

AirBNB goes to great lengths to obfuscate the data, includng the location of the rental until you rent. The insideairbnb.com data is not preciseb locationally but the overall count of full time units is near the city's estimates.(and that's just AirBNB, not the other STR companies).

You can argue if more density in this manner is better or worse, but it does not achieve the goal if huge percentages are just bought up by corporations for short-term rentals. Entire apartment buildings on Rainey are AirBNBs. Those ten thousand unavailable units put a huge squeeze on what is already extremely limited resources (capped by geographic limitations no matter how much you build).