headgasketidiot t1_ivem83j wrote on November 7, 2022 at 12:21 PM

Reply to comment by popquizmf in Re: Vermonters' reputed attitude toward out-of-staters by newsandseriousstuff

> AirBnBs aren't the problem, it's most AirBnBs that are the problem. People who convert part of their home, or make a yurt on their land to rent, those people are not the problem, and your "just ban it!" Attitude isn't specific enough. That's why tax incentives work better when done well.

Your "when done well" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. My point is that your solution is just my solution + more steps + an exception for rich people.

If you want to tax things to disincentivize them, you have to make carve outs for the things you mention or you end up disincentivizing those too. If you have to go through the exercise of figuring out what's harmful and what's desirable anyway, then our solutions look the same except yours lets rich people pay their way out of it.

Why not just ban airbnbs in single family homes and allow yurts, spare bedrooms, etc.?

edit: fix autocarrot

smokiechick t1_ivfhnpy wrote on November 7, 2022 at 4:23 PM

I can't imagine the cost of enforcing those restrictions. No one in their right mind would self-report and we don't have the manpower to do inspections. If we have a registry, so that we know which properties are in this category, we can prosecute them for property tax evasion when income is disclosed.

I have an axe to grind against AirBnBers, so I'm more than happy to spend my free time figuring out how to make them suffer financially. Throwing them out doesn't prolong suffering nor does it earn revenue for the state.

headgasketidiot t1_ivfk28d wrote on November 7, 2022 at 4:39 PM

I could not disagree more. Tax enforcement is famously complicated, while by its very nature short-term rental has to be well advertised and publicly available to be viable as a business. AirBnB et al provide you with a list or properties along with a description. It'd be so much easier to enforce a ban on SFH housing on airbnb and other sites than for each town to audit the property taxes of every house to figure out if that person actually lives there and if so which tier of property taxes they belong to and such. We know rich people will just pay for accountants to try to skirt the rules, which will lead to very complex tax audits of rental empires. It's well documented that the IRS is underfunded and can't enforce the existing tax rules at the federal level.