If you are trying to rent an apartment for a few days of tourism in Brooklyn or Manhattan, you will be surprised by the few offers on Airbnb or on the VRBO platform. The municipality of New York, like Paris, where finding accommodation is an obstacle course, implemented a law this week which prohibits owners from renting tens of thousands of furnished tourist accommodations for a period of less than 30 days. . The new legislation – stricter than that of Paris City Hall where, since 2021, only main residences can be rented freely for a maximum of 120 days per year – authorizes an owner to rent a room in their apartment provided that they are at him 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.
But these rental permits have so far only been granted to barely 10% of applicants. Fines for illegal rentals are already set to be between $1,000 and $7,500, but they will only hit landlords. 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 studios to four-room apartments – 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% year-on-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 to the market for leases of one year or more and to perhaps lower prices a little. Which makes Marianne LeNabat, a 44-year-old New Yorker, say that the town hall’s decision “is probably necessary.”
“Housing is completely unaffordable in New York and […] removing thousands and thousands of homes from the market (for very short-term rentals) is obviously a problem,” she underlines to 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 sends a very clear message to millions of potential visitors who will have fewer choices: “You are not welcome. ” “.
As for small landlords, who own one or two homes, the ban on short-term rentals “will jeopardize the ability to repay their property loans, causing an additional crisis in the housing market, and placing them financially and personally in danger,” according to their association Rhoar.
This is the case of Tricia, who does not want to give her last name, and who, at 63, rents the ground floor of her small, typical Brooklyn house to earn some $3,000 per 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 assuring that it will respect the minimum 30 day rule.
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 revenue. 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 a night.
“There are so many young people visiting New York who can’t afford hotels,” notes Joe McCambley, 66, a regular Airbnb customer, who “thinks New York is shooting itself in the 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 solving the housing shortage in New York.
