Airbnb's success story stands out in stark contrast to the struggles of other startups. Unlike Zillow's disastrous attempt at house-flipping, Airbnb has flourished for over a decade. Their revenue skyrocketed, tripling from $3.3 billion to nearly $10 billion. Even more impressive, they flipped profitability, going from annual losses of $4-5 billion to earning the same staggering amount. Perhaps the strongest indicator of their dominance is their resilient stock price. Unlike the post-IPO crashes
  • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
    9·
    8 months ago

    Soil consumption is one of the many environmental problems we face. Polluting and consuming more soil to condition the market is nonsense IMHO. Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents. This also addresses the issue of locals being pushed further and further away in the cities they live, which creating more houses doesn’t solve (it will just be the next round of isolated dormitory periferic areas, which have already tons of problems).

    Short term rentals for houses was a very good and lucrative idea, but it’s harmful to basically everyone but the landlords who rent out houses there. As such, we should simply strongly regulate it to discourage it as much as possible, if not banning it directly.

      • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        Agree. Social housing has been one of the first areas to suffer from cuts everywhere. It is a problem on its own, which short term rental makes worse.

        The problem is that building is basically an irreversible use of land. It’s only recently that we started seeing land as a commodity (few centuries) and with the current state of affairs, it’s insane to leave it as such. Soil is too precious and too scarce to let market inefficiencies waste it. We should really explore all options before we decide to simply build more, especially in Europe where the population growth is basically null.