What did Banning Airbnbs in NYC Accomplish?
Almost nothing for rents, and a real cost for lower-income hosts
This summer, hundreds of thousands of soccer fans have come to New York for the World Cup and the city has decided to send many of them to New Jersey.
In March, with the tournament bearing down and hotels already quoting record rates, Airbnb asked NYC to pause its current ban on short-term rentals for two months so New Yorkers could rent out their homes to the overflow.
The City Council chairs denied the request and wrote “not a proposal that we will entertain,” because it “would undermine housing stability at the exact moment when renters are the most vulnerable.”
This comes three years after September 2023, New York City pulled off the largest short-term rental crackdown in American history. Local Law 18 required hosts to register with the city and banned short term rentals overnight, causing Airbnb listings to fall from almost 13000 to around 1600 today.
The promise stated plainly by its backers was to bring apartments back to the long-term market. A month of exceptions in their eyes wasn’t worth the risk.
And yet three years later, rents in NYC are up 11% and hotels are the most expensive on record. So what was the real effect of the ban?
NYC’s Airbnb Capital was Not SoHo
To get a sense of what short term rentals (STR) looked like in NYC before the ban, I took the last full snapshot of every NYC listing (March 2023, via InsideAirbnb), and looked at where Airbnb and STR were concentrated in the city.
Citywide, STR were 0.59% of the rental stock pre-ban. As expected, some of the densest STR neighborhoods were the most touristy. Midtown had 3.3% of their rental inventory as STR and Nolita at 3.1%. But New York had two big Airbnb belts and the overall densest STR neighborhood was Cambria Heights at 4.8%.
That number is high partly because almost no one there also rents. The Southeast Queens cluster including Springfield Gardens, Laurelton, St. Albans, Rosedale are on average 63% owner-occupied. These STR weren't apartments pulled off the rental market but rather spare floors or ADUs hosting travelers for brief stays close to JFK airport.
And yet one of the side-effects from the ban was its disproportionate impact upon the lower-income non-white residents that comprise these neighborhoods. In the richest fifth of zip codes, a lost listing was worth about two months of the neighborhood's median income. In the poorest fifth comprising 89% non-white, it was worth almost six.
Southeast Queens is where it compounds. The belt hosted more than twice as many short-term rentals per home as the Manhattan core, and earned far less to begin with.
Did the ban actually reduce rents and accomplish its goal?
By January 2024, the banned listings had scattered. 44% had left Airbnb entirely, 42% had converted to long-term rentals with 30-night minimums, 7% switched to renting a private room, and 7% were still operating as short-term rentals1.
The law was supposed to force homeowners and landlords to put their rentals back on the market, increase supply, and allow rents to soften.* And while supply did re-enter the long term market, it still doesn’t capture if it eased rents. We can measure this by comparing rents in the Airbnb-heavy neighborhoods and see if they fell or grew more slowly after the ban compared to neighborhoods with almost no Airbnbs.
Six of the ten fastest-growing neighborhoods were high-Airbnb areas. The ten densest sat dead mid-pack, with 10.4% rent growth against a citywide median of 11.1%2. Midtown, the most exposed big neighborhood in Manhattan with 776 banned listings, saw asking rents rise 14.6%. The places that lost the most Airbnbs got rent increases at or above the same rate.
I ran an event-study difference-in-differences: comparing rent trajectories in high-density versus low-density areas, within the same borough and controlling for new construction3. To summarize, there was no notable effect size. The best estimate is that the ban saved the typical renter about $52 a year4 but with a confidence interval of -$71 to +$175.
It wasn’t clear why NYC thought the ban would make an effect when the city completes 28,000 new housing units per year. The total number of banned Airbnb units, if every single one returned to the long-term rental market, would equate to about five months of ordinary homebuilding. The realistic version, given that 42% of listings immediately converted to legal 30-day rentals and an unknown fraction of the rest ever re-entered the rental market, is more like two to three months of construction.
What the ban did do is erase a short-term rental economy that was grossing roughly $290 million a year and fracturing it towards hotels, New Jersey, the long-term market, and a drop in tourism. Airbnb activity in Jersey City and Newark is up 241% since the ban, picking up roughly $45 million a year in host revenue that used to be New York’s.
Conclusion
If a law is a hypothesis, this one failed to prove itself. Local Law 18 was supposed to bring apartments back and ease rents. And though it gave back a few months of ordinary construction, there’s no sign that it actually meaningfully eased rent growth.
New York’s real problem is frozen in its housing supply. Against those forces, the entire short-term rental fight is a contest that generates more PR than any kind of real measurable impact for renters. Roughly 40% of the rental stock is rent-stabilized and largely frozen, and in late June the city froze it further, holding rents flat on about a million apartments.
What gets understated is who paid for it. The city spent its political capital on a ban that took income from lower-income and non-white households and returned nothing to renters. Three years on, hotel prices are at records, rents kept climbing, some families lost a side income, and the Airbnb hosts who used to serve JFK are set up across the river in New Jersey, booked for the World Cup.
Local Law 18 carves out buildings already allowed to host transient stays: hotels, apartment-hotels, condo-hotels, and “Class B” multiple dwellings, a certificate-of-occupancy category that permits stays under 30 days. A unit in one of those was never an illegal short-term rental, so the ban does not touch it and it keeps booking nightly, legally. That is part of why a small share kept operating after enforcement.
I ranked all 90 neighborhoods in the StreetEasy panel by asking-rent growth from August 2023, the month before enforcement, to May 2026, then checked where the Airbnb-dense neighborhoods landed.
Methods. Treatment is entire-home, sub-30-night Airbnb listings per 100 renter-occupied units, from the March 2023 InsideAirbnb snapshot. Rent outcomes come from two independent panels: Zillow’s ZIP-level index (80 ZIPs, 2019–2026) and StreetEasy’s neighborhood median asking rents (90 neighborhoods). The estimate is an event-study difference-in-differences with unit and borough-by-month fixed effects and a new-construction control, standard errors clustered by unit. The income-loss analysis uses a wider set of 173 ZIPs with stated review-rate assumptions and sensitivity bounds. All rent measures are asking rents.
Every dollar figure here is an asking rent, what landlords list, not what tenants sign at the table. Asking rents move faster than achieved rents, so read them as the ceiling.