Airbnb to limit hosts to listings at one address in SF

I had a fabulous vacation -- a lot of nothing to do! It suited me well. I had been feeling so overworked....so I relished the opportunity to do "nothing" -- or nothing that was "useful"...
I enjoyed exciting things like --- walking back and forth in the living room on the thick, soft carpet. Being astonished at the size of the living room and continually looking up and around. ( I called it a great room...it's a geodesic dome so it's quite tall...not short and low like one might think of a Hobbit House). Opening the patio sliding glass doors and looking out at the woods. Looking out the window at the rain! Dancing to some Indian music. Having some tea. And then some more tea. Browsing in books full of photos of rustic stick furniture. And .....swimming from one end to the other of the giant king size bed! I have never slept on a king size bed before -- it does feel like you're in a bed the size of a house. I looked at the little corner of it I inhabited and kept being amazed how much more bed there was that I hadn't explored yet. New lands, over the horizon.

Hosted vs unhosted --- hosted means when the host lives in the places where they have guests,and are present when the guest is there. True home sharing in other words -- what Airbnb was all about when it started. Non-hosted means more like the standard "vacation rental" (the kind I just enjoyed on my little vacation) where the host is NOT present when the guest is there -- the whole house is rented out to the guest.

The city is intending to cap all short term rentals to 60 nights a year:

Feet-attacking cats are a special type, I think -- not all cats would do that. I don't have a cat but I have friends with cats and I've known some kitties and they vary.

Yes, CC I think that is the point of the new law -- to dissuade anyone from doing short term rentals unless they just do it now and again to meet interesting people. 60 days a year is not a business that one can rely upon to help pay the mortgage, the property tax, or the rent, or really for anything much. I think this idea that people are only doing short term rentals to meet people from around the world is one that -- as in situations like this -- can backfire on hosts and harm us. Although it's true for a certain segment of hosts, that they don't really need the income, I doubt that this is true for a majority of hosts. And as I've said before many times, short term rentals seems to be the only type of business in the world where others don't think you're doing well if you make enough money. The idea has caught on that the "best" host is one who doesn't make much money, and the hosts who are making a decent income -- are not decent. That's a distorted way of looking at someone's business and it's disturbing to have government take basically that approach with their regulations on STRs.

Well I have some curiosities as to how this law would be enforced. The problem that many cities are having with short term rental regulations, is that the more they want to control what hosts do, the more they find that they have obstacles to such enforcement -- such as host's constitutional rights to privacy and First Amendment rights to freedom of speech -- little things like those get in the way.

Cities can't determine how many nights a host has rented out a space unless Airbnb provides them that information. And I think it would be a dangerous precdent for Airbnb to provide such private data to governments. Governments always have the right to issue subpoenas for information in particular cases, but in the USA governments do not have the right to ask for huge amounts of corporate data just so they can go on "fishing expeditions" and sift through it for violators.

I'm happy to hear you had such a nice holiday, Deborah. The pictures of the hobbit house looked so cute.