@Lia15331 The new link works; thanks for re-posting it! I still don't think it would help your cause for someone like me here in Berlin to sign - your local officials will take the petition more seriously if the signatories were their own constituents, or perhaps residents of the places guests in your town most often visit from.
You make some well-expressed points in the letter that give me the impression you'd be an excellent advocate for this cause at city council meetings, or whatever your town's equivalent is. I totally agree that it's unfair for responsible hosts like you to be tarred with the same brush as "flophouses," although unfortunately there are a lot of bad actors among us who desecrate the cause for all other hosts. As far away from your town's reality as it may seem, some major markets are infested with the kind of hosts who repurpose single-family houses and apartments as illegal dormitory hostels with several beds to a room, or manage too many properties at once to perceive when they've become a nuisance to the community. And at the moment, Airbnb appears to be nurturing its predatory property manager clients and its flophouse-running sycophants to the detriment of the traditional single-listing hosts like yourself, who provide the great hospitality that the brand is built on.
What I'm saying here is, Airbnb is not a benign player in this game, and as a company they have no intention to restrain themselves when the opportunity emerges to let one of the big-time property managers infiltrate a small town like yours and transform it beyond recognition. Hosts like us are the Human Shields; Airbnb performs a cabaret for the media about how hosts are all just local families trying to make ends meet, but in reality their market-domination strategy has little time for this kind of hosting.
Your community is not unwise in seeking to regulate this untamed beast before it gets out of control, but it could benefit from the guiding hand of leaders who have hospitality expertise and have a keen sense for where to strike a balance and compromise. Nobody but you is going to care about how new regulations will cut into your personal profits, so I recommend finding ways to unite your cause with other small business owners in the hospitality and tourism trade to propose a more nuanced set of regulations with a view toward preserving the quality of life for longtime residents and better integrating STRs into the mix of tourism options. The standard way to go about that is to create a licensing system with a local bureaucracy with a limited number of slots, but I'd love to see some communities innovate a more efficient solution.
