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New Orleans becomes new model for Airbnb to work with cities

Laura Spanjian, a public policy manager at Airbnb who negotiated with the city of New Orleans, in Houston on Tuesday. Airbnb has had a contentious relationship in some cities where it has set up shop, but it has taken a different, more conciliatory approach in New Orleans.Jack Thompson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — When Airbnb started talking to the city of New Orleans last year about how to regulate the short-term rental market there, the company was fighting policy battles in places such as New York City and Barcelona.

New Orleans officials said they sensed that the bruising global confrontations might make the online room-rental company more willing to compromise than in the past. So as both sides worked together to reach a deal to legalize short-term rentals in the city of 390,000, New Orleans gained concessions from Airbnb that few other towns have received. The new rules, which include provisions for data sharing and registering hosts, were passed by the New Orleans City Council last week.

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“Airbnb recognized it would have to change the way they were interacting with cities and change the way things were going for them across the country,” said Ryan Berni, a deputy mayor of New Orleans, who negotiated the regulations with Airbnb.

Airbnb’s modus operandi in New Orleans reflects a move by the company to be more conciliatory with some local governments, especially after a year of tough regulatory battles globally. Working well with local lawmakers has become increasingly important for Airbnb, a privately held company based in San Francisco that is valued at $30 billion and that needs to continue to expand its business to justify that valuation.

Now the hope is that Airbnb’s collaborative approach in New Orleans can be a model for working with other locales. To cement that, Airbnb on Wednesday unveiled a “policy tool chest,” a set of guidelines that reflect the more cooperative strategy it took in New Orleans. The company said it intended to use those guidelines elsewhere around the world to help it work better with local officials and lawmakers.

In New Orleans specifically, Airbnb agreed to share data — such as the names and addresses of its hosts — with the city, something the company has balked at doing elsewhere. Airbnb also agreed that its hosts must operate with a permit, with hosts automatically being registered with the city when they sign up to the service. In a nod to the local hotel industry, Airbnb will also ban almost all listings in the city’s historic French Quarter and set a 90-day annual cap for hosts who rent out entire homes.

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“This is just the beginning,” said Laura Spanjian, a public policy manager at Airbnb who negotiated with New Orleans. “We need to make sure that the rules work and that the city can enforce them, but we want this to be a model going forward.”

Airbnb has tried to play more nicely with cities in the past, but some of those efforts have fizzled. Instead, some cities have increased their opposition to the company as Airbnb hosts have violated local housing laws by illegally renting out their properties and turned quiet residential areas into loud, tourist-filled zones. Advocates of affordable housing say Airbnb has also reduced availability in the process.

In New York City and San Francisco, relationships worsened to the point that Airbnb sued both cities over what it viewed as efforts to curb its growth. The company dropped its suit against New York and settled last week.

Airbnb’s case was helped in the city by a grass-roots group called the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity that supported short-term rentals years before Airbnb came to the table.

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“At first Airbnb didn’t even want anything to do with us,” said Eric Bay, who runs the alliance. “After we’d done our own impact studies and proposed ordinances, Airbnb eventually wanted to be our partner and friends.”

From the outset of discussions between the company and New Orleans officials, Airbnb showed it was willing to cooperate. It quickly became clear, for example, that the hotel lobby, a powerful interest group in a city that relies on tourism, would have a big say in any final regulations. Airbnb agreed to restrict listings in the hotel-heavy French Quarter to satisfy the industry’s demands.

Lawmakers also knew that the city would need more money to enforce new short-term rental rules. So Airbnb agreed to collect hotel taxes and an additional $1-a-night fee from guests to help defray such costs.

But there was a sticking point: sharing data about Airbnb hosts with the city. Airbnb was initially reluctant to do so because of privacy concerns for its hosts.

The company eventually agreed after New Orleans officials said they would protect the data and not make it public. That information will be essential in helping the city register hosts and for fining hosts $500 a day if they violate the new home-sharing rules. The city can even shut off utilities to Airbnb properties where rules are being broken.

“I was pleasantly surprised by the dialogue and by Airbnb’s approach,” said Berni, the deputy mayor. “It was more amicable than what a lot of other cities had experienced.”

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