Coverage: San Francisco voters strike down Airbnb restrictions

San Francisco residents voted against a ballot proposal that would have limited short-term rentals within the city to 75 days a year and put limitations on Airbnb users.

Proposition F would have required Airbnb users to submit quarterly reports of when they were home, opening up privacy concerns for users. In order to block the proposal, Airbnb spent $18 million in a marketing campaign to galvanize voters against Prop F.

Casey Newton of The Verge had the election results:

Unofficial results showed that more than 55 percent of voters said no to Proposition F, which would have limited short-term rentals of housing units to 75 days a year, required Airbnb users to submit quarterly reports detailing when they were at home, and made it a misdemeanor to unlawfully list a house as a short-term rental. While San Francisco is not one of Airbnb’s biggest cities by number of hosts, the measure has been widely watched for its potential to inspire copycat measures in other places around the world. It was also symbolically important given that Airbnb is based in San Francisco — a fact that inspired an ill-fated ad campaign that the company took down almost as soon as it went up.

Elizabeth Weise of USA Today explained how Airbnb outspent its competition:

An expensive fight over Airbnb here ended with voters opposing a measure that would have restricted short-term rentals.

Proposition F would have limited users of Airbnb and other short-term rental sites to renting out rooms, houses or apartments short-term for no more than 75 days a year, down from the current 90 allowable.

Airbnb spent more than $8 million to oppose the measure. Supporters, who included hotels, hotel unions and housing advocates, spent closer to $800,000, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Fifty-five percent of voters opposed Proposition F and 45% were in favor, with 100% of precincts reporting late Tuesday, the San Francisco Department of Elections said.

“Tonight, in a decisive victory for the middle class, voters stood up for working families’ right to share their homes and opposed an extreme, hotel industry-backed measure,” Airbnb spokesman Christopher Nulty said in a statement.

Caroline Donovan of BuzzFeed News described what Prop F entailed and how Airbnb regulatory battles in San Francisco are far from over:

With the failure of Prop F, the city of San Francisco’s regulation of short-term renting defaults to the legislation that was passed last October. Hosted short-term rentals, in which the resident of the home is present, are unlimited as long as the property is registered; un-hosted rentals, in which the guests are alone on the property, are limited to 90 days a year. In July, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee created the Office of Short-Term Rental Administration in the city. That office, headed by Kevin Guy since Sept. 15, will ultimately have a staff of six. So far, Guy told BuzzFeed News, it has received 221 complaints and assessed $335,000 in penalties.

Airbnb will undoubtedly celebrate the failure of Prop F as a victory for the company. The vote, which has been referred to as a “referendum” on the sharing economy, will bolster the company’s claim that the majority of San Franciscans support home sharing. It may also work as a cautionary tale for other cities looking to regulate Airbnb.

But the saga of regulation for Airbnb in San Francisco isn’t over. The law currently on the books in the city has been in effect for less than a year, and parts of it haven’t even been enacted yet. The ballot measure’s failure is an opportunity for the city’s Board of Supervisors to revisit that legislation, should they be so inclined.

Alejandro Lazo and Douglas Macmillan of The Wall Street Journal explained how convincing investor regulatory problems won’t continue to plague the company has kept Airbnb from going public:

Regulatory uncertainty remains one of the last major barriers to a potential initial public offering. The company told investors it expects revenue of more than $900 million this year, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. It is burning through cash to expand and forecasts an operating loss of about $150 million this year.

In San Francisco, the company viewed the Proposition F battle as a clear threat. The ballot measure was born from a long simmering political debate over Airbnb and other sites that operate in San Francisco. The city’s Board of Supervisors passed a law last year to regulate home sharing, limiting it to 90 days a year when a host isn’t home. But activists said the law didn’t go far enough.

About $2 million of the money it spent in San Francisco went to supporting field operations that included two campaign hubs and veteran field organizers, according to Airbnb. The company said it recruited 478 unpaid volunteers and made contact with 67,000 voters as of the weekend.

The company said the provision that would have allowed neighbors to take to court home-sharing companies—and those using the services to host their homes—would be subject to abuse.

Airbnb also opposed a part of the measure that would have required people who host homes on such sites in San Francisco to file reports on a quarterly basis, indicating the number of days the unit is occupied by the homeowner or primary tenant and when it is rented out.

The company said the measure does nothing to add to affordable housing and that it would have made it harder for middle-class San Franciscans who rent out their homes using such services to supplement their income.