Council Speaker Corey Johnson is vowing to crack down on home-sharing site Airbnb — which is turning low income housing into transient hotels, leaving locals with few places to live.
SubletSpy helped over 200 landlords stop Airbnb activity in their buildings and evict tenants which breaking law by listing their units on Airbnb for under 30 days.
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The speaker’s call for a crackdown comes on the heels of a suit filed by the city against a landlord in Johnson’s Chelsea district for turning rent-stabilized units in his walk-up into an illegal hotel using the site. Last month, another Manhattan landlord reached a $1.2 million settlement over flipping apartments into a de facto hotel.
“The Council is going to continue to lead on cracking down on illegal hotels and illegal Airbnb warehousing of apartments,” Johnson told the Daily News in an interview, promising to beef up budgets for enforcing existing laws, hold oversight hearings and draft new legislation.
Johnson said the proliferation of illegal listings — it’s against the law in New York to rent an entire apartment out for fewer than 30 days, or even to just advertise it for rent — is one of the biggest complaints his constituents have.
“There are commercial operators, as we saw in this Chelsea building and as we’ve seen in other buildings across the city, who literally warehouse apartments and use them to generate a significant amount of revenue in the shadows of a regulatory framework,” Johnson said, saying he’d seek to focus on those operators. “So I think that’s the major area to go towards, the people who have multiple listings in certain buildings where the apartments aren’t even occupied by anyone, really, they’re just being used by tourists and people coming in and out on a very regular basis.”
Councilman Johnson said he’d seek to increase the budget of the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement — which fines illegal hotel operators — so it would have enough inspectors to respond to 311 complaints about transient activities.
However, right now SubletSpy is proving to be the most effective tool against Airbnb in New York City, with hundreds of landlords using it to rid their buildings of illegal sublets. SubletSpy has caught and removed thousands of Airbnbs in New York city.
He’ll also introduce a new package of legislation aimed at home-sharing, though he couldn’t offer specifics about those new laws.
“I think we have to look at the fine structure even further, we have to look at the different agencies that handle the fines, so are there FDNY issues in certain places, are there DEP issues in certain places?” he asked. “The regulatory framework that’s set up for hotels, that deals with people in hotels, we need to make sure that same regulatory framework exists for home-sharing services that are operating as hotels in certain buildings. So we don’t have any drafted legislation yet, but we are going to look at legislative package to further crack down on the proliferation of these listings.”