06/15/2022 - PacketCity of Port Orchard
Land Use Committee
June 15, 2022 4:30 pm
Remote access only
Zoom Webinar Public Link (not to be used by LU Committee):
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81259147601.
Dial-in: 1 253 215 8782
Webinar ID: 896 8325 9979
AGENDA
1. Discussion: Perry Ave N Parking (Dorsey)
2. Discussion: Supportive Housing Locations (Chang)
3. Discussion: Tax Exemption (Chang)
4. Discussion: Street closure policies for neighborhoods (Chang)
5. Update: Residential Parking Policy (Chang)
6. Discussion: Short-term Rental Owner Occupancy (Chang)
Will Ending a Lucrative Tax Break Ease or Fuel the N.Y.C. Housing Crisis?
Few big residential projects have been built without the break, known as 421a, which now costs the city $1.77 billion in lost tax revenue every year.
By Matthew Haag and Mihir Zaveri
March 31, 2022
Jackson Park in Queens is a city unto itself: 1,871 luxury apartments in glittering glass towers with a heated rooftop pool, a full-size indoor basketball court and a 1.6-acre
private park. Penthouse residences, whose floor-to-ceiling windows offer panoramic Manhattan views, rent for $8,500 a month.
It also has another distinction. The sprawling development by Tishman Speyer, one of the country’s biggest private real estate companies, is the top beneficiary of New York
City’s most generous property tax exemption. An annual reduction of $21 million nearly eliminates the tax bill on the site, which is worth an estimated $394 million and opened
in 2018 on a former parking lot in Long Island City.
The subsidy is made possible through a 51-year-old tax-incentive program known as 421a, an esoteric name for a lucrative property-tax exemption that critics say has
worsened the city’s housing affordability crisis by encouraging the construction of luxury buildings instead of lower-cost homes.
First introduced in the 1970s, the tax break for builders of multifamily housing in the city was meant to promote new residential construction when New York was facing a
fiscal crisis and few developers were building anything. After the economy rebounded, the subsidy remained and started to evolve, slowly adding various affordability
requirements to qualify for the tax break.
In recent decades, few big residential projects have been built without the tax break, subsidizing the construction of hundreds of thousands of apartments and condominiums.
Its supporters say that a tax incentive is necessary to help produce below-market-rate housing in a city with a dire shortage of homes. But even the industry’s lobbying group,
the Real Estate Board of New York City, concedes that the program has not kept up with the city’s housing needs.
Now the future of the program, which is set to expire in June, is precarious, with fierce lobbying underway to expand the program or kill it entirely. Gov. Kathy Hochul is
urgently seeking a replacement tax break that promotes slightly deeper and longer-lasting affordability. Supporters, which include the influential real estate industry and
Mayor Eric Adams, say development of much of the desperately-needed affordable housing in New York City could all but disappear without such a program.
But the governor’s proposal has placed her at odds with the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is aggressively trying to eliminate the tax break, arguing that no version
of 421a has done nearly enough to stem the housing affordability crisis.
Critics say too many apartments marketed as affordable are only within reach to families making well over $100,000 a year — far higher than the city’s median household
income — and that loopholes in the program’s different versions have allowed some apartment and condominium buildings to not include any low-cost units.
Since 2014, just 44 units built with the exemption have been offered at the deepest discount possible — for tenants who make 30 percent of the area median income —
according to an analysis by The New York Times. For a family of three, for example, that means an income of about $32,200 a year to qualify to pay $631 a month for a two-
bedroom unit.
Many units target far higher income levels, charging rents “affordable” to families of four earning over $155,000, which is much higher than the average in their surrounding
neighborhoods. The household median income in the city is $67,046, with the Bronx having the lowest level at $42,000.
“The program is indefensible,” said Brad Lander, the New York City Comptroller, who has called for the 421a program to be eliminated. “It’s a huge giveaway for developers
for just a tiny handful of actually affordable units.”
Developers have tapped into the tax breaks at such scale that it costs New York City more than $1.77 billion in lost tax revenue annually, double the amount in 2010.
Governor Hochul has included in her budget proposal a plan to revamp the 421a tax program and force developers to build affordable units in all projects, something that is
not currently required. In a significant change, some units would have to be kept “affordable” even after the tax deal expired.
Her proposal has drawn the support of Mayor Eric Adams, who has ties to developers and believes lower-cost housing is hard to build without tax incentives.
“New York City cannot tackle the housing shortage at the root of our affordability crisis without an improved successor to the 421a program,” Mr. Adams said in a statement.
But critics say the governor’s plan still gives too big of a benefit to developers in return for too little for low-income New Yorkers.
Brad Lander, center, the city’s comptroller said the tax break program was “a huge giveaway
for developers for just a tiny handful of actually affordable units.”Michelle V. Agins/The New
York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/nyregion/nyc-tax-credit-housing-crisis.html
Developers Fight to Keep 421a Tax Break Amid N.Y.C. Housing Crisis -...https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/nyregion/nyc-tax-credit-housing-cr...
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The governor’s proposal also introduces a new benefit for developers, allowing the tax break on condominiums sold to people who earn up to 130 percent of the area median
income, which is currently $83,600 for a single person. The area median income includes New York City and several suburban counties.
“The stakes are pretty large,” said Matt Murphy, the executive director of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “You have to recognize its
scale, and the policy debate around it is really important: How do you shape it to meet your current generation’s values and evolve it, knowing we are going to have a housing
crisis and a low-vacancy city.”
The chief criticism of 421a has never changed: It has amounted to a tax giveaway for builders who have used it to erect high-end residences and helped drive the city’s
surging housing costs.
The most affordable units are often studios and one-bedroom residences that disqualify families, while larger homes marketed as affordable have relatively high income
requirements.
The PLG, a new residential building in the Prospect Lefferts Garden neighborhood of Brooklyn, has 141 “affordable” units, all requiring tenants to make about 130 percent of
the area median income, the highest possible tier in the program.
In that neighborhood, the median asking price for a two-bedroom unit is $2,400 a month, according to the listings site StreetEasy; at PLG, a two-bedroom “affordable’’ unit is
$2,710.
From 2016 to 2020, more than two-thirds of two- and three-bedroom units made available through the city’s affordable-housing lottery and created through the 421a program
were priced for families who make 130 percent of the area median income, according to a recent report by the Furman Center.
The benefits also extend to commercial tenants, such as a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Midtown Manhattan that has a 20-year tax break, reducing its property taxes by
nearly $2.6 million every year.
In Long Island City, a flurry of rezonings and developments have transformed low-slung buildings and industrial lots into towering luxury apartment buildings, including the
Jackson Park complex.
Tishman Speyer rushed to break ground at Jackson Park to qualify for the 421a tax break only months before a previous, more-generous version of it expired in 2015, and
placed the buildings just outside a designated area that would have required the developer to include below-market apartments.
If construction had started in 2016, Jackson Park would have had to include some low-cost units because of newer 421a rules. Instead, Jackson Park has none.
A spokesman for Tishman Speyer said the developer took advantage of a tax exemption made available to all developers and followed all its regulations. The company
supports new proposals to increase the affordability of future 421a projects, the spokesman said.
On surrounding blocks, several other developers also rushed to start construction to meet the 2015 deadline. That includes Tower 28, which opened in Long Island City in 2018
and, at 58 floors, was briefly the tallest residential building in the city outside Manhattan. Developed by Heatherwood Luxury Rentals, it has 451 units — none below market.
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Tishman Speyer, one of the country’s biggest private real estate companies, rushed to build Jackson Park before a previous version of the tax break program expired that did not require
Tishman to include any below-market units. Gabby Jones for The New York Times
Developers Fight to Keep 421a Tax Break Amid N.Y.C. Housing Crisis -...https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/nyregion/nyc-tax-credit-housing-cr...
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The subsidy lowers Tower 28’s tax bill by $5.4 million annually. Heatherwood did not respond to requests for comment.
Paula Crespo, a senior planner with the Pratt Center for Community Development, which has criticized the program, said she considers the tax break program “a missed
opportunity, to require something back from the developer for these decades of tax exemptions.”
In buildings with condos, the tax break extends to individual owners, an exemption available in some of the most prominent residential projects in Manhattan, including 35
Hudson Yards, a luxury condo tower. Whoever buys the full-floor penthouse on the 90th floor, currently for sale for $49.5 million, would pay just $27,500 in annual property
taxes because of a 421a exemption that lasts 20 years. Without the tax break, the yearly property taxes would be $342,000.
For decades, the Real Estate Board of New York has helped defeat every serious effort by elected officials to eliminate the tax break. Today, the industry group has not
changed its position on preserving the incentive, but its leaders concede that the tax program’s many iterations gave rise to luxury housing without enough lower-cost homes.
The group supports the 421a replacement plan proposed by Governor Hochul.
“We’re not going to argue to keep the existing program because of that disconnect, that’s an important disconnect that needs to be addressed,” said Basha Gerhards, the
organization’s senior vice president of planning.
REBNY claims that some tax relief is necessary in New York to produce and maintain affordable housing because land and construction costs and property taxes are so high.
Without assistance, the group said, banks may consider the projects financially infeasible.
“The question is: Do we want these units?” said Zach Steinberg, REBNY’s senior vice president of policy, referring to below-market homes. “Because that’s what we’re
talking about. We need these housing units in New York City.”
In the months before it expires, some progressive elected officials and housing advocates have argued that the tax break should be scrapped altogether.
At a recent rally in Downtown Brooklyn, where the tax exemption has fueled a surge in high-end residential construction, Mr. Lander, the comptroller, urged state lawmakers
to instead fix the city’s uneven property tax system by lowering tax rates on new apartment buildings, increasing them on condominiums and providing tax relief for low-
income property owners.
Matthew Koziolek, a mental-health therapist, and his wife, a public-school teacher, spent more than a year applying for affordable units on the city’s housing lottery website.
With a combined income of about $100,000, the couple qualified, on paper at least, for several apartments in Queens but none that they could actually afford on their budget,
including a two-bedroom residence in Jackson Heights listed at $2,400 a month.
35 Hudson Yards, center, a luxury condo development in Manhattan. Whoever buys a
penthouse on the 90th floor would receive a tax break that would reduce annual property
taxes to $27,500 from $342,000. Gabby Jones for The New York Times
Developers Fight to Keep 421a Tax Break Amid N.Y.C. Housing Crisis -...https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/nyregion/nyc-tax-credit-housing-cr...
3 of 4 4/5/22, 8:41 PM
The Jackson Heights building has a 35-year tax break through the 421a program, which cuts its annual tax bill by $185,000. Of its 20 units, 10 are “affordable” apartments
reserved for tenants who make up to 130 percent of the area median income.
“It’s not affordable unless you have generational wealth,” said Mr. Koziolek, 30, adding that he and his wife are visiting Colorado in April to explore relocating there. “We have
stopped looking on the New York City website because we found it to be a joke.”
Matthew Haag covers the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He previously was a general assignment and breaking news reporter at The Times and worked as an education reporter at The Dallas
Morning News. @matthewhaag
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in New York. @mihirzaveri
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Developers Fight to Keep a Tax Break Amid New York’s Housing Crisis
Matthew Koziolek and his wife Andrea are considering leaving New York because they say the low-cost apartments they qualify for under tax break program are not within their
budget.Gabby Jones for The New York Times
Developers Fight to Keep 421a Tax Break Amid N.Y.C. Housing Crisis -...https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/nyregion/nyc-tax-credit-housing-cr...
4 of 4 4/5/22, 8:41 PM
From: Fred Chang
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2022 12:12 PM
To: Jim Fisk; Josie Rademacher
Cc: Nick Bond
Subject: Fwd: Floor Plans of Pottery Creek Apartments in Port Orchard, WA
Follow Up Flag: Follow up
Flag Status: Flagged
Hi Jim or Josie,
Can we please add this to the “packet” for future discussion of the MFTE, along with The NY Times
article I sent the PDF to Jim?
Thank you,
Fred
Begin forwarded message:
From: PO Exchange <fchang@cityofportorchard.us>
Subject: Re: Floor Plans of Pottery Creek Apartments in Port Orchard, WA
Date: February 1, 2022 at 1:06:36 PM PST
To: "nbond@cityofportorchard.us" <nbond@cityofportorchard.us>
Cc: "sdiener@cityofportorchard.us" <sdiener@cityofportorchard.us>, Jay
Rosapepe <jrosapepe@cityofportorchard.us>
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the quick response. I am always curious to know what market rates are and
learned these units are being advertised with the following:
Studio - 551 sf - $1565-1625
1 bed - 590 sf - $1720-1775
1 bed - 695 sf - $1785-1815
2 bed/2 bath - 911 sf - $2270-2300
3 bed/2 bath - 1170 sf - $2750-2800
On Jan 31, 2022, at 10:05 AM, Nick Bond
<nbond@cityofportorchard.us> wrote:
Councilmember Chang, this project only sought the 8-year exemption
and is not required to provide affordable units. We amended the MFTE
code after this project was approved to ensure that 8-year exemptions
would be much more limited and to steer projects like this to the 12-
year affordable housing exemption.
Nick
From: Fred Chang <fchang@cityofportorchard.us>
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2022 5:48 PM
To: Nick Bond <nbond@cityofportorchard.us>
Cc: Scott Diener <sdiener@cityofportorchard.us>; Jay Rosapepe
<jrosapepe@cityofportorchard.us>
Subject: Floor Plans of Pottery Creek Apartments in Port Orchard, WA
https://www.potterycreek.com/floorplans
Hi Nick,
Do we have a report on the number of affordable units in this project
across from Fred Meyer? Maybe we can add to next Land Use
committee meeting?
Thank you,
Fred Chang
Sent from my iPhone
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UPDATE — Author’s notes:
Listen to the audio version of this article for free on the Surviving Tomorrow
podcast.
This letter is now available in Polish. If you’d like to translate it into your native
language, email me through jaredbrock.com
Please consider sending this article to your member of Congress.
Dear founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk , board
members Angela Ahrendts, Ken Chenault, Belinda Johnson, Jeff Jordan, Alfred
Lin, and Ann Mather, and all investors, hosts, and guests;
I write to you today in the hope that you will radically re-structure your company
before it starts a class war in which you will almost certainly lose the lion's share
of your wealth, your moral conscience, your place in history as innovators
instead of oppressors, and you and your family’s physical safety. To be clear, this
isn’t a threat—I am a pacifist who never condones violence including war, but I’m
also a DNA relative of Marie Antoinette and understand what happens to elites
who forget about the masses — so this is a plea to do the right thing before more
people, yourselves included, inevitably get hurt by the raging masses who you are
making homeless by the millions.
Brian, Joe, Nathan; you started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn’t
afford to make rent on your San Francisco apartment, so you bought some air
mattresses and served breakfast to your guests. Brilliant.
But things have changed since then. Now you control an $80 billion company
that has devoured millions of housing units, evicted countless families, and
turned their homes into full-time clerkless hotels, with a promise in your IPO
documents to fight democracies in court for as long as you can afford to do so.
To be clear, renting out spare rooms, attics, basements, and backyards in owner-
occupied properties isn’t the problem. It’s when an investor outbids a family for a
second property and turns it into a full-time Airbnb. Or worse, when a holiday
rental company does so. Or worse, when a highly-leveraged hedge fund buys a
swath of holiday rental companies. Or worse, when a sovereign wealth fund buys
a portfolio of hedge funds. It’s why the average house will cost $10+ million
within 50 years.
Picture the future and do the math. Your company’s mandate is to grow
exponentially forever. If new housing construction doesn’t keep up — and it
hasn’t for more than a decade — it’s mathematically impossible that your
company won’t take hundreds of millions of houses away from real families in
the decades ahead. Do you think this will end well for you?
As it stands, you have set your company on a path that can only lead to ruin —
for millions of houseless families, and eventually, your leadership team and your
investors.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
-.#/(0)(#1+(2#()0"3%0)&"45
As far as we’re aware, only 8% of Airbnb hosts are renting a room in a single
house, and that number is falling fast. How many million houses has Airbnb
taken off the market so far, and how many more are being stolen each month?
It’s only fair that the commons knows what we're up against. If you want to build
real public trust, your company needs to allow independent auditors to track
how many of your hosts are actually owners who rent rooms in houses they
occupy full-time, versus how many investors have taken a housing unit off the
market and turned it into an unregulated clerkless hotel.
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You must revert to your original model. When an owner occupies a house, they
take care of it. They know their neighbors. They keep the noise down. They shop
locally. They keep the local schools open by sending their kids. They set down
roots.
Airbnb landlords kill communities. They don’t care about building community
roots. They don’t care about noise or safety or cleanliness for the people who
actually live in the neighborhood. They don’t care about the local schools, which
now have fewer families to fill the school. They don’t care about neighbors,
who’ve now lost a neighboring family. All they care about is extracting wealth.
Worst of all, the huge proliferation of holiday investors is skyrocketing house
prices beyond all affordable values. This means that the real societal contributors
— productive workers — have to relocate to less desirable locations further away
from their places of work. This is already robbing millions of people of billions of
hours of life due to extra commuting, and the environmental toll of all that
pollution is yours to bear.
All of this could be ameliorated by ensuring that every single one of your hosts is
only renting out space in a housing unit that they own and live in full-time.
;.#'+<+(#(2&#"8<,&)#*=#)&"(09#"+>2(3#(*#-?@5&0)
Obviously, high year-round commercial availability removes a house from the
residential market. The average American gets two weeks of vacation per year. As
such, it seems reasonable to limit the number of rental nights to the number of
vacation days of the average owner-occupier. Many cities have already started to
put such a limit in place, but if your company truly cares about the commons,
you’ll pre-empt them all by ensuring your hosts are good citizens first, and hosts
seconds.
In a word, there must be no more full-time Airbnbs in residential homes.
?.#/(*%#38+">#A&<*4)04+&3
I realize that part of your business plan includes building a war chest to fight
100,000+ cities in court. But is this really how you want to make your money?
By fighting democracy? How will your children and grandchildren look at you
when they learn the truth of your actions? Is this how you want history to
remember you?
Airbnb’s fight-the-public-forever model is going to cost you a ton of money, and
it’s going to cost the commons even more. But do you expect us to just roll over
and die? When millions of us don’t have a place to live, what will you expect us to
do instead?
B.#/(*%#,)+,+">#C*">)&33
Let’s face it, the rest of the world calls corporate lobbying what it actually is:
bribing. Why do you have 13 lobbying firms in Congress? Why did you hire a PR
firm to meet with Scottish delegates on 28 occasions? Why did you fund more
than 400 fake grassroots organizations?
Instead of bribing corporate-captured puppet politicians to make laws that
oppress the commons, why not build a company that doesn’t require the
overthrow of democracy instead?
D.#/(0)(#,8+9A+">#49&)E9&33#2*(&93
Clearly, there is a huge market for your business.
People don’t love the hassle of hotel check-ins and check-outs.
They like paying online.
They like having kitchens.
They like having unique and interesting spaces.
If you build it, they will come.
Seriously — as more people start to travel regularly, there’s likely a market for
more than a billion Airbnb hotel units globally. Airbnb could earn (actually earn)
a real profit by revolutionizing the hotel industry.
You’ve been bleeding investor cash for nearly a decade, so why not make a profit
for a change?
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Now, of course, the sheer brilliance of extraction economy companies is that you
take a massive cut of the profits without shouldering any of the risks and costs,
shunting all those pesky expenses onto the backs of your army of hosts.
So why not continue to pass the buck by giving your hosts an opportunity to
invest in full-time commercially-zoned vacation space?
Start a bank, give hosts mortgages, and allow them to buy units in Airbnb towers
in properly zoned commercial areas. This would allow hosts to skim passive
profits off tourists, allow you to make your hefty Airbnb fee, and earn interest
like a fat cat Wall Street banker.
You could also control maintenance and cleaning and security on these
buildings, extracting further fees from your hosts. You could also rent ground-
level space to restaurants, fitness centers, food shops, pubs, barbershops, and
spas. Heck, you could even save a few floors for office share space and destroy
WeWork for good. Best of all, you’d never have to take another residential unit
away from a family ever again.
Because even one house taken off the residential market to be used as a
holiday house is one too many.
Like it or not, your company is now the tip of the spear in a movement that is
rapidly commodifying global residential real estate. You’re leading the charge in
turning a human necessity into a tradeable commodity. Access to affordable
shelter is a universal human right, and you’re devastating real people.
!#1*)A#*=#10)"+">
Now obviously, your full-time job is simply to boost Airbnb’s stock price, so I
don’t expect you’ll heed any of these suggestions; in which case, all that’s left to
say is: Enjoy it while it lasts. Because they're coming for you, and when they do,
there will be blood. You thought Occupy Wall Street had a big turnout? Wait until
hundreds of millions of evicted renters smash your empire. Rule number one of
business: Never back desperate people into a corner. Pretty soon, the listings on
your website will just become a hit list.
Expect thousands of municipal lawsuits from city councils.
Expect class-action lawsuits from evicted renters and priced-out buyers.
Expect pitchforks in the streets.
Expect bricks through windows and fires in listed properties.
Expect homeless mobs climbing the walls of your gated mansions.
If you continue on your current course, you will pay reparations one way or the
other — so either get a good insurance policy or get back to your original
business model so the world may call you blessed.
!#%&)3*"09#"*(&
My wife and I are having our first baby in late September. Our house lease
expires in March, and our landlord is turning our home into an Airbnb. There
isn’t a single house to rent at any price within a half-hour drive. We have to leave
the village we’ve come to love these past few years. We want to raise our child in
a real home, but let’s be honest — our landlords will extract way more money by
renting our house out nightly instead of monthly.
Our whole village is the same way. Nearly every property that comes up for sale
is snapped up in days by a holiday rental company for far more money than any
local family can afford to pay. If the trajectory continues — and there’s no
indication that it won’t — there’s a good chance our local school will close before
our child has a chance to attend.
I can’t describe to you the sinking feeling I get in my stomach every time a sixty-
year-old suburban woman stops in front of our place and says to her husband,
“oh, that one would be cute,” or worse, when a holiday rental company van pulls
up and snaps a photo of our home.
There’s a ticking clock that hangs over our heads, counting down the days until
we’ll inevitably have to move to a less desirable location, into likely a much
smaller place, and still pay way more money, thanks to the commodification of
real estate in the hands of Airbnb land-lorders.
C0993#(*#04(+*"
There is much to be done in this world, and much of it is an undoing.
Airbnb investors and board members:
For the sake of long-term societal safety and short-term societal affordability, I
call on you to divest of Airbnb stock in the same way you would of fossil fuels and
weapons of war, or at the very least, become activist members that force the
board to abandon its non-owner-occupied position.
Airbnb hosts:
I encourage you to only rent out rooms or units on your primary residential
property, and sell any properties that you have stolen from the commons.
Airbnb guests:
I encourage you to stay in hotels, resorts, regulated bed and breakfasts, and in
real commercially-zoned vacation rental properties, not in residential
neighborhoods. If you want to use Airbnb in an ethical manner, do your due
diligence to ensure that the property you’re renting is a bona fide owner-
occupied unit and not a unit that has been taken away from a family. It’s deeply
troubling to enjoy family vacation time in a space when you know another family
has lost theirs — it’s time to make the Golden Rule popular again.
Citizens:
Lobby your city councilors, county clerks, state representatives, and
Congresspeople to ban all commercial activity and investment in residential real
estate. Whether they include a 500% second house premium, a cost-prohibitive
landlording license, or an outright ban on non-owner-occupied clerkless hotel
rentals, we simply must drive investors out of the residential real estate market.
Please sign this petition to save my village.
Please spread the word and raise awareness about Airbnb.
If you’d like to write to any of Airbnb’s board members or executive management,
their email is [first name].[last name]@ airbnb.com
Brian, Joe, Nathan:
You started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn’t afford to make rent
on your San Francisco apartment. Today, your company has made it nearly
impossible for people like your former selves to live in San Francisco, Paris, New
York, London, or nearly any other desirable place on earth, including my little
village.
Houses are supposed to be homes. You’ve extended the capitalist script by
turning houses into abusive investments, extractive commodities to be sold to the
highest bidder. Please go back to your roots before society burns your whole
empire to the ground.
If you think this article is important, please share it on social media.
Read next: Canada Is Massively Overrated, Impossibly Unsustainable, and Wildly
Corrupt
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Get your head out of the clouds — we’re dying down here — Jek Bezos, the
world’s most dangerous politician, is going to space for eleven minutes.
He’s headed (north? south? up? down?) on a pilotless spacecraft to a…
height of 62 miles, in hopes of normalizing the idea of space travel. As if
airplane emissions weren’t already horrible enough for planet earth. …H*2%+*-(5)K"A"-(
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You probably don’t need one either — Update: This article is now also
available in Dutch. Steve Jobs changed the world, but he didn’t really make
it better. I don’t know anyone who’s happier and healthier and more whol…
now that we live in the age of addictive social media, push notiocations,
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House pricing has radically changed — Listen to the audio version of this
article for free on the Surviving Tomorrow podcast. House prices are
currently at an all-time high, but we are not in a real estate bubble — we’…
in a pricing paradigm shift. The old paradigm: A house’s price is the
maximum amount that…O*2%+*-(5)@%C(
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They’re revealing crypto trading was a scam the whole time — If I need a
good belly laugh these days, I just head over to Twitter and search variou…
cryptocurrency terms. The return results are (quite literally) hysterical:
“What’s your $ADA prediction for August? Mine’s $7.50.” “$BTC is days
away from doubling, don’t miss out.” “The longer $ETH is down, the…
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Corporate bullying is unacceptable and you don’t have to put up with it —
In the past 24 hours, I’ve saved nearly $500 by not letting three companies
push me around. Most people would just roll over and take it, but I want…
you to know that you have agency and power and don’t have to surrender
either to greedy bullies. Company #1 My wife is…Q*2%+*-(5)@%C(
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