San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is using a gunfight that surprised a sleepy street in Bernal Heights last October as part of his salvo against property owners who illegally rent out their homes on short-term rental sites such as Airbnb. On Wednesday, Herrera announced that his office had filed a lawsuit against the couple that own 212 Banks St.,...
City Attorney: Faux leases, faux tenants hid couple’s $700,000 profit on illegal Airbnb hotels across 14 residential properties — $5.5M penalty sought. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera today threw the book at pair of city landlords who, having already settled a suit charging they were operating more than a dozen illegal Airbnb hotels across the city, allegedly spent the...
There’s a funny story about the ascension of Karol Wojtyla to Pope John Paul II. Upon hearing the news, a shell-shocked colonel in the Polish secret police uttered, “My God, from now on we’ll have to kiss his ass.” A savvier Party secretary replied, “Only if he lets us.” At 12 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 17, Kevin Guy became San...
Earlier this month, while walking up Alabama Street from Mariposa en route to a show at Project Artaud, Tarin Towers spotted something even more surreal than much of what you’d find in an avant-garde art space. “I saw two young, well-dressed people carrying two fancy roller bags — each,” she recalls. That’s not who you’d expect to be traipsing along...
A federal district court judge on Tuesday denied homesharing company Airbnb, Inc. its request for an injunction against a San Francisco law aimed at protecting local rental housing stock from being used as tourist lodging. Further discussions will be held in court, however, about the enforceability of the regulation. The law, authored by District 9 Supervisor David Campos, prohibits homesharing...
Progressive politicos, activists, and other movie-goers descended on the Roxie Theater on Friday night for what has become a San Francisco tradition in recent years: lamenting tech’s influence on the city, particularly its financial takeover of local politics. Supervisors David Campos and Aaron Peskin, State Senator Mark Leno, author and journalist David Talbot, and various aides, journalists, and local activists...
Fur is flying nationwide as cities around the country figure out how to deal with the housing arm of the sharing economy – short term rentals, a.k.a. Airbnb. Locally, District 9 Supervisor David Campos has joined lawmakers around the country in signing a letter, Elizabeth-Warren-style, to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to study to what extent Airbnb and other...
San Francisco’s renters are giving the city top marks – in everything except affordability, of course, where they give it the equivalent of blowing a raspberry. That’s according to a renter satisfaction survey from Apartment List. Interestingly, the other thing renters in the survey were particularly unhappy with is the quality of schools. Also surprising: Respondents were more or less...
A nine-bedroom home on Dolores Street near 16th Street is for rent for $18,000 a month, possibly as an “Airbnb Cash Cow” or a tech incubator. The broker, Bill Harkins, said any master tenant who chooses to pursue the rental as an Airbnb short term rental rather than a family home or a home for several roommates would have to follow...
San Francisco Supervisors today approved legislation that requires short term rental platforms like Airbnb to list only rentals that have undergone the required registration process with the city. The legislation places the onus on Airbnb, HomeAway and other hosting platforms to make sure hosts who want to rent out part of their homes to visitors have gotten a business license...
A proposal that would hold home sharing platforms like Airbnb responsible for listing units not registered with the city moved one step closer to approval on Thursday when it secured a recommendation from a Board of Supervisors committee. “This is not about changing the existing law. It’s simply about making sure that this law that has been in effect, that...
Some of the most progressive members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are firing another shot in their ongoing battle with short term rentals, introducing legislation that would require homesharing platforms to verify whether hosts are registered with the city as local law requiresand charging hosting platforms fines of up to $1,000 per day per violation. A 2015 Budget...
A study by the Penn State School of Hospitality Management, funded by the American Hotel & Lodging Educational Foundation and the American Hotel & Lodging Association, indicates that a small number of full-time hosts account for a disproportionate amount of the home-sharing giant’s revenue in some of the country’s biggest cities, including San Francisco. Some 2.9 percent (308) of San Francisco’s Airbnb hosts were found to be full-time hosts,...
A short time in the future in a galaxy very similar to our own, where housing is the hottest commodity on the market, everyone is scrambling to hold on to or get in on the good stuff. Exhibit A: Corporate landlords want a slice of the Airbnb pie, reports the Wall Street Journal. Some of the nation’s biggest property management...
The upcoming November election is shaping up to be one of the most controversial in recent years. A new housing bond, a moratorium in the Mission, and short-term rental regulations are on the ballot to address the city’s worsening housing crisis, albeit it in very different ways and drawing varied reactions. Tech firms and private developers have spent millions to...
