We often hear that Democrats are set up for a decades-long political dynasty in this country because of demographics. They own the Millennial vote and they'll continue to own it for as long as Millennials are around.
Maybe. But there's a reason people tend to become more conservative as they get older, and it usually has to do with the fact that they have to go out and tackle real responsibility. Once they do, they often realize that Democrats are not their friends - unless, of course, they become part of an influential pressure group or segment of society that has become expert at manipulating public policy to its benefit.
Millennials love Airbnb, just as they love Uber. They're new twists on old ideas - finding a place to stay, finding a ride - that are less geared toward the old establishment and more geared toward a new way of thinking about things. Airbnb is particularly attractive because it allows millennials to not only rent out their own properties, but also to move about more freely because it's easier to make arrangements with other property owners without having to pay expensive hotel rates.
And ever since these newfangled services started to catch on, the old line has been pressuring politicians to crack down on them. Last week, the State of New York was happy to oblige. For all intents and purposes, it's now impossible to legally use Airbnb in New York:
The politicians are responding to hoteliers and unions that claim that mini-Donald Trumps are buying up properties and renting them as “illegal hotels.” This doesn’t check out: More than 95% of New York Airbnb hosts sharing their entire home post only one property, and the company last year yanked roughly 3,000 illegal listings out of some 44,000 in New York. The hotel industry also riled up some affordable housing groups to say that Airbnb is driving up the cost of rent. One irony is that more than three-quarters of hosts say that sharing their space helps them pay rent.
The real complaint is that Airbnb is unwelcome competition, and here’s how you know: The company already offered Empire State regulators everything they claimed to want. Airbnb said it would ban New York hosts from renting more than one property; require online registration for hosts; ban users who break policies three times; and collect state taxes so that hosts couldn’t cheat. That’s right: Airbnb wanted to help New York dig up more revenue.
Airbnb has already sued to block the new law, and New York may need a good lawyer: Federal law pre-empts holding platforms like Airbnb responsible for the content of its advertising, and there’s also the detail that the First Amendment protects commercial speech. As Airbnb general counsel Rob Chesnut put it in a letter to Gov. Cuomo and others last month: “The ban on advertising is, at its core, a ban on speech.” New York’s censure serves no compelling government interest, unless you count enriching various Democratic constituencies.
This is a classic restraint of trade, and all the more odious that it will hurt the people Democrats claim to champion. Airbnb points out that hosts in zip codes with the highest percentage of black New Yorkers earned $43 million from rentals in 2015, and that more than 21,000 millennials host an Airbnb property. New York’s progressives claim to love the little guy, but they love big business donors more.
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The same thing is happening with Uber. Taxi cab companies are complaining to politicians about Uber drivers not being licensed and so forth, and you can bet it's just a matter of time before a lot of jurisidictions bow to their political benefactors and either ban or seriously restrict Uber as well.
In the case of Airbnb, I can tell you it was a lifesaver for my family and me a year ago at this time. We sold our house in summer 2015 with a date of September 2015 to be moved out. We timed it to coincide with the expected completion of the new building we were moving into. But the building wasn't ready when it was supposed to be, and we had to scramble. As it turned out, the wait would be five months. A hotel is not a suitable place to live for that length of time, and if we'd stayed at the Residence Inn, it would have cost us $6,000 a month.
Yet good luck finding any apartment complex to rent you a property for only a few months. They have no interest in that.
Because of Airbnb, we were able to find a temporary place we could afford until our new home was ready. It was exactly the sort of situation that makes Airbnb attractive to a lot of people, who might have a situation or a need that doesn't fit the usual box - and that's why a lot of Millennials like it and use it from both sides of the equation.
The decision of Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign this ban is strictly power politics, siding with the old established guard against the up-and-coming new player, because the old guard still contributes a lot more money to Democrats. I wonder how long Millennials will take to figure out that the way they want to live their lives is antithetical to what big-government Democrats think and do. Hopefully they figure it out while we've still got a country left.
We often hear that Democrats are set up for a decades-long political dynasty in this country because of demographics. They own the Millennial vote and they'll continue to own it for as long as Millennials are around.
Maybe. But there's a reason people tend to become more conservative as they get older, and it usually has to do with the fact that they have to go out and tackle real responsibility. Once they do, they often realize that Democrats are not their friends - unless, of course, they become part of an influential pressure group or segment of society that has become expert at manipulating public policy to its benefit.
