🎯 STRisker: Bulletin - New York City, NY
NYC’s Post-Airbnb Reality: Short-Term Rentals Down, Rents Still Up
NYC’s Airbnb Crackdown Didn’t Fix the Housing Crunch
Back in 2023, New York City leaders thought they’d cracked the code: rein in Airbnbs, open up apartments. Local Law 18 became the city’s strictest-ever short-term rental rule, requiring host registration and blocking unlicensed bookings. By 2025, illegal listings had plunged from tens of thousands to just a few thousand.
Yet here we are in September 2025 — and the city’s housing crunch hasn’t eased. Rents remain near record highs (Manhattan median at $4,571) and vacancies are at a jaw-dropping 1.4%. What went wrong?
Turns out, removing Airbnbs didn’t automatically create more homes for New Yorkers. Many owners switched to longer minimum stays or simply took properties off the market. The short-term rental pool was always a sliver of NYC’s total housing stock, so slashing it couldn’t dent the larger affordability crisis born of underbuilding and strong demand.
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Local residents did get a breather from tourist foot traffic in their buildings, but travelers saw fewer options and higher hotel prices. In fact, hotel revenue per night in Manhattan surged 7% since 2023, hitting record rates during peak seasons. Meanwhile, Harvard Business Review economists warn that outright bans are a blunt instrument — hurting visitors and small hosts without fixing the root cause.
Other cities are also experimenting. Amsterdam’s ban on vacation rentals in its historic center was overturned, and Barcelona is taking a gradual phase-out approach through 2028. The lesson? Balance may work better than blanket bans.
Policy experts now push for middle-ground measures: caps on how many nights a home can be rented, stricter licensing by neighborhood, and mandatory platform data-sharing to target big-time investors rather than occasional hosts. For a city like New York, where every apartment counts, that might be the key to unlocking a healthier housing market without losing visitor dollars.
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