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.