How to stay rich - pay politicians to squelch competition

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/regulating_rooms_right038729.php


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July 20, 2012 5:30 PM Day’s End and Weekend Watch

I’m about talked out today. But here are a few final items:

* At Ten Miles Square, Harold Pollack suggests that this time we don’t put a mass murderer’s face on magazine covers or publish any ravings he happens to emit.

* Also at Ten Miles Square, Ezra Klein ruefully outlines the kind of constructive conservative candidate Mitt Romney might have been—but refused to be, and probably couldn’t be in today’s GOP.

* At Salon, Paul Campos—a Coloradan—hopes that the Aurora nightmare will help remind us that 15,000 Americans are murdered every year.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer runs through the debate over what to do with Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State.

* At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky meditates on wealth, success, failure and envy in the context of the documentary, The Queen of Versailles.

And in non-political news:

* Boutique apologizes for “Kim K-inspired Aurora Dress” tweet.

That’s it for today. Kathleen Geier, who has a lot of fans here, will be back as Weekend Blogger tomorrow.

I’ll end the day’s blogging much as I started it: for the victims in Aurora, their families and friends, and our ever-stricken human race: the “Agnus Dei” from Mozart’s Requiem.

Selah.
by Ed Kilgore
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July 20, 2012 4:45 PM Regulating Rooms Right

“The danger of any ordinance restricting commerce is that it will wind up protecting incumbent interests at the expense of new entrants into the market,” notes journalist Blake Fleetwood in “DIY B&B,” his contribution to the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly. And that’s exactly what’s been happening to the rapidly growing and recession-driven home-grown B&B industry as municipal governments around the country pursue a regulatory crackdown that seems designed not to ensure safety and honesty—or even revenue—but simply to protect traditional hospitality interests.

In New York, Fleetwood reports, a unemployed homeowner named Jonathan Hogan found himself confronted by police officers and city officials for the sin of renting out spare rooms over the internet:

For more than a year now, New York City has been enforcing a new state law that makes it illegal for homeowners like Hogan to rent out their house or apartment for less than a month. All across the city, police raids have shut down hundreds of similar informal bed-and-breakfast establishments, with nearly 1,900 different violations issued in under twelve months. Often, the fees associated with the citations stretch into tens of thousands of dollars. Hogan was threatened with a $25,000 fine—all for marketing the empty rooms in his house.

The backstory is that a combination of hotels, hotel unions, and tenant activists (who feared landlords would dump tenants from rent-controlled apartments to begin supplying vacation rentals) lobbied for and secured a new state law in 2010 making rentals for under a month in New York residential buildings illegal. Another tourist-rich city, New Orleans, has begun enforcing a similar ordinance, and several Florida municipalities have moved in the same direction. While some regulation (and taxation) of a previously obscure but now booming internet-based B&B industry seems reasonable, the over-reaction in New York and elsewhere threatens the ability of entirely legitimate enterprises that often makes use of the only asset struggling homeowners possess.

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