Construction of the J Line in Dolores Park | Circa 1916 | W3326 | Horace Chaffee, Board of Public Works Photographer SFMTA

It is 7 a.m., 58° and headed to 71° and is there really a chance of rain? Details for today and the next ten days are here.

Lots to catch up on with Airbnb. First, the rental service will start paying hotel taxes on October 1, but no word if it will pay back taxes, according to SF Gate. 

Then there is the minutia of how the city’s new regs on Airbnb renters will look. There are still a couple of hearings left before this goes to the full Board of Supervisors, but if you want details, here they are. 

Bernal has a new coffee shop, the Pinhole, and the Bernalwood reports that it is “awesome.” How are Missionites, regulars of Ritual, feeling about the new Ritual? Yes, I have my reservations and I keep visiting to see why.

SF Weekly reports on the new BART “brightening crews.”

Enjoy!

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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3 Comments

  1. It is not clear how Airbnb could collect any such past taxes because the hotel tax is paid by the guests and not by the hosts or by Airbnb.

    So Airbnb would have to write to all the guests who had ever used that service for home-share stays in SF, potentially going back years, and ask those guests to pay a tax that they were not informed about.

    Moreover, many of those guests are overseas and therefore effectively immune from US debt collectors.

    Usually the way these things work is that it is a quid pro quo for starting to collect a new tax that a bright line is drawn under the effective date, so that there is no retrospective liability.

    Whether the city can collect a hotel tax for home shares is a question for the courts to decide at a later date but, for now, this move appears to disadvantage Airbnb and benefit their competitors who, of course, are not under the same obligation.

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      1. Nobody knows if this “stuff” is taxable because a court has not yet determined that, nor validated the city’s self-serving claim that an occasional home share is like a 500-room hotel.

        And it cannot be both illegal and taxable at the same time, so you really need to make up your mind which it is.

        Me? I never used Airbnb much anyway and now will not use them at all, for obvious reasons.

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