Airbnb, by far the largest service in the sector, valued at over $25 billion, spent $8 million to defeat the measure.
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Almost 140,000 of those people are in San Francisco, where the ardent among them went door-to-door and business-to-business for weeks leading up to the vote, urging people to reject the proposition.
The referendum aims “to prohibit converting rental units from residential use to tourist use, and help preserve the availability of housing in San Francisco”, according to the wording.
Leading up to the vote, there was an expensive fight between Airbnb and supporters of the measure.
Proposition F, as the measure is known, would have limited short-term rentals to 75 days per year, regardless of whether the property is occupied by the existing resident, and would have banned short-term rentals of suites or apartments attached to homes.
That would be a significant change in the current law allowing 90 days per year if the resident is absent and places no limits on renting a “hosted” spare room. Platforms would have also been required to report data to the city about which units were rented for how many nights each quarter.
“Tonight, voters stood up for middle class families’ right to share their home and opposed an extreme, hotel industry-backed measure”, Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s head of global policy and public affairs, wrote in a blog post on the company’s website. With broad backing from Lee and the Board of Supervisors, as well as tech titans such as Airbnb, the measure collected the two-thirds vote needed to pass. Proponents, who have raised about $300,000, say the proliferation of short-term rentals is squeezing the city’s already tight housing market. Dubbed “100 Clubs” by the company, the initiative aims to network Airbnb users – hosts and guests – around the world into a series of guilds.
Critics of Prop F said the measure is a misplaced attempt to fix a decades-long housing crisis.
The “home-sharing” company Airbnb has narrowly escaped a regulatory crackdown after voters in San Francisco sided with it in a local referendum.
According to a July investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, only 350 San Francisco homes listed on Airbnb appear to be full-time rentals. To get the win, the Giants announced that they would put aside 40 percent of their planned 1,500 units of housing as below-market-rate and dropped planned heights of the buildings from 380 to 240 feet. It struck many as tone-deaf and smug – and Airbnb pulled it the day after it launched. Its headline said, “Housing is the most important issue facing San Francisco”, followed by “the Democratic Party’s endorsements to make housing more affordable”.
Voters also shot down a measure that sought to suspend construction of market-rate housing in the city’s Mission District for at least 18 months.
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Airbnb’s explosive growth – it has more than 2 million listings in 34,000 cities – has spurred pushback from lawmakers, neighbors, landlords and housing activists in many of those cities.
