San Francisco may revise its latest attempt to crack down on vacation rentals in private
homes, hoping to stave off issues raised in a lawsuit filed by Airbnb that seeks to halt new enforcement measures.
Supervisors David Campos, Aaron Peskin, Eric Mar and John Avalos introduced new language at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting
to update a get-tough amendment that the supervisors passed unanimously in June. The June amendment, which is now facing legal challenges from Airbnb, was scheduled to take effect July 27. Its enforcement is on hold pending a judge’s ruling on Airbnb’s request
for a temporary injunction, which will be heard in early September.The ultimate aim of both sets of amendments is to impose steep fines
and criminal penalties to hold services like Airbnb, HomeAway and FlipKey accountable when vacation-rental listings lack the city’s mandated registration number for hosts. Only about 1,472 hosts, out of many thousands, have met a requirement to register with
San Francisco before renting rooms or homes to travelers….

As these discriminatory incidents
continue to happen across the country, many have begun to question if Airbnb’s case-by-case responses are good enough, or whether there’s more the room-sharing service could do to prevent discrimination. Because what happened to Fisher was anything but isolated.
In the past year, a gay couple in Galveston were kicked out of a woman’s home when she realized they were gay — after they had already settled in. A black man from Washington, D.C., sued Airbnb after a host denied him housing under his real profile — but accepted
him when he created a fake profile as a white man. And a transgender woman in Minneapolis was denied housing because of her gender identity. Both the transgender woman and black man claimed that Airbnb did nothing to help them. To top it off, three Harvard
researchers even provided statistical proof of what they called “widespread discrimination” on Airbnb: In a December study, they found people with black-sounding names such as Lakisha or Rasheed were 16 percent less likely to be accepted by Airbnb hosts than
your white-sounding Kristens and Brents. After enough backlash piled up, Airbnb announced last month the company was reviewing its discrimination policy, which requires hosts to abide by all federal, state and local anti-discrimination and civil rights laws….

Airbnb is finding out that fixing discrimination is a really long and difficult road.
The home-sharing company has come under fire in the last few weeks over the racism and discrimination against some
of its customers while they used the service. Even a hashtag—#AirbnbWhileBlack—emerged on social media amid the flood of conversations about the topic.
Of course, Airbnb quickly denounced racism in public statements and apologies. During its annual engineering conference
in San Francisco, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky declared that the company had started a 90-day review of its entire service and that, “We have zero tolerance for any discrimination.” But
Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, an non-profit that organizes a variety of programs to teach coding to girls
of color, thinks there’s more it can do. “I wonder, do you not recognize that some of the issues in the design of the
product, as is, is being driven by the fact that it’s not inclusive design,” she told the executives during a question and answer period after the panel. “Perhaps [it’s] because there’s only 2% black people that work at Airbnb, there’s only 3% of Hispanics
that are part of the Airbnb community and if we go down further into the tech ranks it’s like 1%.
So while I appreciate the redesign efforts, I really would challenge you to look at what are the employee makeups at your
companies and how can you do more to hire engineers, to hire designers that would be able to look at your product from this lens.”…

Chesky also said, “As a founder, I think we were late to this issue. We were so focused
on an issue of trust and keeping people safe, responding to other people’s issues on trust and safety, that we took our eye off the ball.
When we designed the platform, three white guys, there were a lot of things we didn’t think about.”..

Short-term rentals on Airbnb and online vacation sites would be taxed like hotel rooms under
a bill being considered by Massachusetts lawmakers, with the money funneled into an expansion of the state’s earned income tax credit. The proposal, announced Tuesday as part of a broad economic development bill advanced by the Massachusetts Senate, would
generate up to $20 million per year for the state by applying the 5.7 percent hotel excise tax to stays of 31 days or less at private residences. Home rentals would also be subject to a 2.75 percent state surcharge that finances the convention center and additional
hotel taxes imposed by cities and towns, which can reach 6.5 percent in Boston and 6 percent elsewhere in the state….

The latest update from Airbnb could easily slip by. The company said today (July 12) that it’s partnering with three travel management companies—American Express Global Business Travel, BCD Travel, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel—to give their clients a chance to book on Airbnb. When the home-rental site is busy suing San Francisco, facing potentially crippling regulations in New York, and struggling to prove its platform isn’t racist, that announcement feels comparatively trivial. But it should have hotel proprietors quaking at their reception desks….

ALBANY — The City Council’s progressive caucus has written to Gov. Cuomo urging him to sign an anti-Airbnb bill into law.

The first-in-the-nation legislation would prohibit the advertising of home sharing in multifamily units in New York City for less than 30 days and carry fines of up to $7,500 for multiple violations.

In their letter sent to Cuomo Friday, the 15 Council members called the bill, which was sponsored by Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan) and Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island), a “groundbreaking
measure” that will “go a long way toward stopping the proliferation of illegal hotels that currently puts affordable housing at risk.”

The bill was passed by the state Assembly and Senate in June and managed to unite two usual foes — housing activists and developers.

Cracking down on the advertising “will enable the city to recapture thousands of housing units illegally rented on short-term rental sites like Airbnb,” the liberal caucus letter said.

A Cuomo spokesman said the governor is reviewing the legislation. Airbnb opposes the measure, saying 96% of hosts the bill would impact have only one listing — their own homes.

Airbnb opposes the measure, saying that 96% of the hosts the bill would impact have only one listing — their own homes. Airbnb spokesman Peter Schottenfels said the 15 council members who signed the
letter represent more than 25,000 hosts “who are clearly not being heard.”

“The only thing groundbreaking here is that these politicians continue to willfully ignore the fact that this bill targets the wrong people,” Schottenfels said.

“It does nothing to deter the commercial operators and instead hurts responsible New Yorkers who rely on home sharing as an economic life preserver.”

ALBANY — Airbnb is putting big money into its fight with city and state
lawmakers. The home rental website has stocked a newly created political action committee with $1 million to help spread the word to voters about its legislative battles, company officials told the Daily News Friday. Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan),
a frequent critic of Airbnb, said the company’s move to create a PAC was a “very cynical act” that will not help its cause. “I don’t think they can buy public opinion on this,” said Rosenthal, who sponsored the advertising bill that passed the Legislature
in June. “If they wanted to actually bring their site and policies in compliance with New York State law, we’d all be a lot better off.”…

Airbnb, in an apparent attempt to make nice with Governor Cuomo while he
contemplates signing a bill that will pretty much kill their business in this city, announced this week that they’ve spent the last year removing 2,233 listings from their platform over concerns they might be illegal hotel operators.
The embattled home-sharing website announced the removals, on Thursday, noting in a statement that the removed listings
were put up by hosts “with multiple listings that could impact long-term housing availability,” and not by hosts who were only renting out their primary residences. The removals have happened gradually from late November 2015 to June 2016.
The city has been hard at work cracking down on illegal hotels, claiming that a significant chunk of Airbnb users
advertise multiple dwellings on the site, with a report last year finding that from 2010 to 2014, 37 percent of revenue generated by Airbnb hosts came from hosts with three or more listings…

Airbnb recently filed suit against San Francisco over a new rule governing short-term rentals, which the city’s Board of Supervisors approved last month. An Airbnb-supported law
adopted earlier this year requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city, but it’s estimated that only about 20 percent of them — about 1,400 out of 7,000 — have done so. The new rule requires short-term rental listing services like Airbnb to
enforce the law by ensuring that hosts advertising on their websites have registered with the city before posting ads online. When the city flags suspect rental ads, the listing service must respond with details about those properties within one business day
— or incur fines of up to $1,000 a day per listing, as well as face misdemeanor charges. Airbnb had vowed to fight the rule, and late last month filed suit in United States District Court….