Complaints about Airbnb are deeply misplaced

Airbnb Offers a Property-Rights Opportunity by Christina Sandefur.

"Masada Siegel’s complaints about her home-sharing neighbors (“The Airbnb Hotel Next Door,” op-ed, Sept. 3) are deeply misplaced. City hall, not Arizona’s home-sharing law, is to blame if nuisance ordinances are not enforced.

Though websites like Airbnb and HomeAway are relatively new, offering one’s home to paying overnight guests is centuries old. The vast majority of home sharers are respectful to neighbors. True, there may be times when guests are discourteous, but cities already have ordinances to crack down on noisy neighbors. The law Ms. Siegel complains about—Arizona’s 2016 Home-Sharing Act—in no way diminished that authority. Instead, it blocks cities from imposing across-the-board bans on home sharing—bans that punish the innocent for the wrongs of a few. We don’t outlaw all backyard barbecues just because people sometimes get rowdy. Arizona’s law rightly takes the same view: It simply says cities must use existing laws to crack down on bad actors, rather than stripping all property owners—the great majority of whom are law-abiding—of their fundamental private property rights.

Home sharing is an important opportunity for millions of homeowners across America to make extra income to help pay their mortgages, maintain their properties and invest in local communities. Home sharing boosts small businesses by bringing visitors into local communities, and it creates an incentive to fix up properties that otherwise would have fallen into disrepair. All that economic growth is destroyed when city hall imposes one-size-fits-all bans instead of enforcing existing nuisance laws.

Christina Sandefur
Goldwater Institute
Phoenix"