Paul Bass Photo
Harp.
Mayor Toni Harp is happy to see Airbnb expand in New Haven — as long as it follows the same health and safety rules that hotels follow.
Harp made the remarks on her latest “Mayor Monday” appearance on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
She had just returned from Washington, D.C., where an official from the fast-growing private apartment-rental company (with some two million listings in 34,000 cities) pitched Harp and her fellow municipal chief executives for support at an annual U.S. Conference of Mayors conference.
Leaders of the hotel industry, meanwhile, told the mayors that Airbnb threatens their communities’ finances and health and safety. (Read more about that here.)
“I thought it was interesting that the U.S. Conference of Mayors got both of them to sponsor the conference,” Harp remarked. “So for one day the hotel people were talking about how great they were for the economy, how they helped to develop cities, make them better places to live. They were saying all these positive things until the last fourth of the speech. [Then] they started talking about how all of that was in danger because of Airbnb. ‘They [Airbnb] are not regulated. They do not pay taxes. You are losing all of this money.’ They were saying it was really not fair.
“So the next day Airbnb says ‘Look, I know we’re going to say something you never hear from business: Tax us!
“‘We want to pay taxes! We want to work with you. We’ve provided something that no one else has provided, access to vacations that lower income people can have. We want to work with you.”
Harp said the taxes argument wasn’t that important to her — because in Connecticut the state, not cities, keeps the revenues collected for hotel taxes.
She applauded the service Airbnb provides: “People want to visit relatives. The relative doesn’t have enough room. They can do Airbnb. It’s inexpensive. They can be close to where they want to be. If they had to rent a hotel room, it would be very expensive. Certainly you don’t get the comfort of a hotel room, but you get the added benefit of being closer.”
But, Harp continued, “they have a lot of work to do” to win support of mayors like her because of the health and safety concerns. “They do need to have regulation.”
Airbnb listings for New Haven rooms available Tuesday ranged from $49 for a private room “ideal for medical students coming to interview at Yale NHH” to $84 for an “elegant apartment in Wooster Square” and $100 for a “paradise by the sea” apartment.
Nationally, some communities have encountered problems with Airbnb hosts regularly renting their apartments to large groups of partiers; and with people not simply renting out their regular apartments through Airbnb, but buying up apartments to operate full time as de facto (but unregulated) hotel lodgings.
Harp has not received any complaints from citizens here in New Haven about the service. She said she does see the service growing here because “people want to come here to visit their friends for games, that sort of thing.”
On “Mayor Monday,” Harp also spoke about a presentation she and City Librarian Martha Brogan and schools chief Garth Harries made at the D.C. conference, on efforts to get more kids library cards and get them into libraries. The presentation also touched on New Haven’s “restorative justice” approach to school discipline.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the entire episode, which includes discussion of the city’s response to the latest snowstorm. The segment about Airbnb begins at 28:37.
Subscribe to WNHH’s new podcast “Dateline New Haven,” where episodes of the show will be delivered directly to your phone or smart device. (Click here for details on how to subscribe.)
Monday’s episode of “Dateline New Haven” was made possible in part through financial support from Gateway Community College.
