Airbnb Cries 'Stop And Frisk' When Asked To Name Hosts

NEW YORK CITY HALL — An effort to force home-sharing companies to disclose detailed information about their New York City hosts rang the bell for the latest round of a fight between Airbnb and lawmakers Thursday.

City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera (D-Manhattan) introduced legislation Thursday that would require Airbnb and similar firms to hand hosts' names, addresses and listing URLs to the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement, which targets short-term rentals. Platforms themselves would be subjected to fines of up to $25,000 for each listing they don't disclose or report improperly.

"We want to make sure that the landlords who are warehousing apartments or taking rent-regulated units out of our housing stock are brought to justice," Rivera said.

But Airbnb and its hosts oppose giving a trove of information to the Office of Special Enforcement, which already already intimidates law-abiding hosts with little accountability.

"What this is in danger of becoming is the stop-and-frisk equivalency for home-sharing, where they have impunity to operate with no oversight, to pick and choose who they're going stop and who they're going to search," said Kirsten John Foy, a civil rights activist with the National Action Network who's a paid Airbnb adviser.

Debate over the legislation pits Airbnb, a $31 billion company, against the deep-pocketed hotel industry, which has worked to kneecap the firm across the U.S.

The bill is sponsored by 38 of the 51 Council members. Lawmakers want the information to help the city crack down on landlords who turn precious rent-stabilized buildings into illegal hotels. Similar reporting requirements exist in Barcelona, San Francisco and New Orleans, Rivera said.

The Office of Special Enforcement has gone after several landlords accused of flipping full-time apartments into Airbnb businesses, including one company that ran seven such buildings in Hell's Kitchen.

A much-debated report by City Comptroller Scott Stringer blamed Airbnb for about 9 percent of the city's total rent increase from 2009 to 2016.

"Airbnb would like people to believe this is about little old ladies renting out (a) spare bedroom in their apartment, but frankly it's just not," said Jonathan Westin of New York Communities for Change, an activist group allied with the hotel-funded ShareBetter coalition.

But Foy said the bill would "criminalize" communities of color for whom hosting is a lifeline when hotel and real estate interests are to blame for the city's affordable housing crisis. Hosts in predominantly African-American neighborhoods earned $70 million from Aibnb last year, a company spokeswoman said.

Heather-Sky McField stopped listing part of her two-family East New York home on the service after a Department of Buildings staffer pounded on her door about three months ago.

She was never fined, but the single mom said the incident made her afraid to use Airbnb, which is critical to her income. She's currently offering a room on the site but no one is using it.

"Shame on you, New York City officials, that you're going on the side with the big billion-dollar industries instead of your people that are fighting and thriving and paying taxes here," McField said.

Council members say their bill won't target small, law-abiding hosts like McField. Forcing Airbnb to share its data could help the Office of Special Enforcement more precisely target the bad landlords the city wants to root out, lawmakers said.

"Without the data, it becomes much more difficult for us to track down the bad actors and do meaningful enforcement," said Council Speaker Corey Johnson, whose Manhattan district has a high concentration of Airbnb listings.

Asked about the Airbnb supporters' claims, Office of Special Enforcement spokeswoman Alacia Lauer said the office's efforts are driven by complaints from New Yorkers impacted by short-term rentals. It imposed $6.2 million in fines last year and performed over 3,800 inspections, more than double the number of inspections in 2016.

The office "is focused on finding bad actors—people operating illegal short-term rentals—who are often endangering their guests and residents, and impacting quality of life and safety in New York neighborhoods," Lauer said.

The bill has a wide path to passing the Council, with support from a veto-proof majority. But it won't come without a fight. Airbnb and the ShareBetter coalition have run dueling advertisements arguing the other side wants to hurt New Yorkers.

(Lead image: Photo by 9091086/Shutterstock)