San Fran Is Legalizing Airbnb. Should NYC?

The controversial room-rental website Airbnb will soon be legal in its own hometown, San Francisco.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a measure to allow people to rent out their apartments to visitors, even for short stays. Landlords would have to sign up for a registry and pay taxes.

That's pretty different from New York City, which has a huge number of listed apartments but remains under a heavy legal cloud.

So how did Airbnb get the law changed? Carolyn Said, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Airbnb’s strategy in San Francisco “the classic Silicon Valley playbook of innovate then regulate."

She noted that thousands of San Franciscans have been renting on the site, so “even the supervisors who are unhappy about that said they felt the city had to legalize it in some way so the city could also exert some controls over the practice.”