The home-sharing giant wants the City Council to change a 2023 law that effectively shut down most Airbnb listings in the city.

Under the proposed legislation, owners of single-family homes would be allowed to offer rentals without the hosts being present for less than 30 days. The city’s limit on guests would also be lifted, from two to four.

Airbnb is hoping the NYC City Council amends restrictive legislation on how it does business in the city. Shutterstock

The new legislation targets Local Law 18, a two year-old bill that has decimated Airbnb and the rest of the short-term rental market in New York City. 

After faltering earlier this year, the latest bill was quietly amended last week to also undo the existing law’s “unlocked doors provision,” which requires hosts to keep all doors accessible to guests.

The proposed legislation stands to affect homeowners in Brooklyn and Queens the most. Airbnb hosts in those boroughs have said they are financially squeezed by not being able to rent to families and guests who don’t want to share their vacation with a host.

A draft bill loosening the Airbnb restrictions was scrapped in February amid strong opposition from the hotel industry and other groups.

The same sectors are crying foul again – even as hotel rates in the city have steadily climbed since Local Law 18 was enacted.

Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. James Messerschmidt

Dem City Council member Mercedes Narcisse. Stefano Giovannini

The new legislation comes “as Airbnb tries to salvage their multi-million dollar campaign to undermine our housing laws before New Yorkers and a new pro-tenant mayor can stop them,” read a statement from Tenants Not Tourists, a coalition of housing advocates that is supported by the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council union.

Opponents of the latest bill say Airbnb will later try to go further and free up all hosts — including apartments in Manhattan that have largely disappeared from Airbnb’s platforms.

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Airbnb has spent millions on a political action committee supporting City Council members who have been willing to revisit some of the most stringent requirements of Local Law 18. Those include the sponsor of the new bill, Brooklyn Dem Mercedes Narcisse.

Neither Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani nor independent Andrew Cuomo, who’s been catching up to the lefty in the polls, has publicly commented on the proposed change to the city’s Airbnb law.

However, Mamdani, who’s made housing affordability the centerpiece of his campaign, is widely expected to oppose loosening the restrictions.

A Mamdani spokesperson did not immediately answer a request for comment.

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia has been one of the biggest donors to an Andrew Cuomo Super Pac for mayor. REUTERS

Cuomo’s supporters see him as being amenable to changing the law’s tight grip on the home sharing industry in New York, sources said, pointing to the fact deep-pocketed Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is one of the largest single donors to a pro-Cuomo super PAC.

A spokesperson for the ex-governor did not immediately answer a request for comment.

Airbnb has slammed the city’s current law as failing “to deliver on its promise to improve housing affordability.”

Airbnb has supported Andrew Cuomo’s race for mayor of of New York City. Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Post

“Homeowners are struggling even as short-term rentals have all but disappeared,” Michael Blaustein, the company’s Northeast Atlantic policy lead, said in a statement.

Airbnb believes the new bill will get a vote before the end of the year, according to a source close to the company.

The next step is a Council Housing Committee hearing scheduled for Nov. 13. 

The current rules require hosts to register with the city and certify that their homes meet rigorous building, zoning and other codes — or face fines of up to $5,000.

In June, the city sent warning letters to 500 of the 3,000 registered short-term rental hosts here, while another five were threatened with having their licenses revoked, according to Office of Special Enforcement, which regulates the home sharing industry in the city.

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A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple must loosen its grip on its App Store and stop collecting a commission on some app sales, capping a five-year antitrust case brought by Epic Games that aimed to change the power that Apple wields over a large slice of the digital economy.

The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rebuked Apple for thwarting a previous ruling in the lawsuit and said the company needed to be stopped from further disobeying the court. She criticized Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and accused other executives at the company of lying.

In her earlier ruling, Judge Gonzales Rogers ordered Apple to allow apps to provide users with external links to pay developers directly for services. The apps could then avoid the 30 percent commission that Apple charges in its App Store and potentially charge less for services.

Instead, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said on Wednesday, Apple created a new system that forced apps with external sales to pay a 27 percent commission to the company. Apple also created pop-up screens that discouraged customers from paying elsewhere, telling them that payments outside the App Store may not be secure.

“Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.

In response, she said Apple could no longer take commissions from sales outside the App Store. She also restricted the company from writing rules that would prevent developers from creating buttons or links to pay outside the store and said it could not create messages to discourage users from making purchases. In addition, Judge Gonzalez Rogers asked the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate the company for criminal contempt.

The ruling — a major victory for Epic and a stinging defeat for Apple — has the potential to change the app economy by increasing the money that developers collect while reducing the fees that flow to Apple. That strikes at one of Apple’s major businesses, with its App Store long the most prominent destination for people to download mobile games, productivity tools and other programs.

“There’s going to be a lot of latitude for developers to get better deals and for consumers to get better deals,” said Tim Sweeney, Epic’s chief executive. “This is a wonderful, wonderful day for everybody.”

An Apple spokeswoman, Olivia Dalton, said in a statement: “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order, and we will appeal.”

Apple’s shares sank 1.5 percent in after-hours trading.

Epic, the maker of the game Fortnite, brought the antitrust lawsuit against Apple in 2020. In the suit, Epic accused Apple of forcing app makers to use its payment system in exchange for access to the App Store, which is the only way to distribute apps on iPhones. The rules allowed Apple to collect as much as a 30 percent commission on many transactions.

The App Store makes up a large portion of the nearly $100 billion in annual services revenue that Apple collects.

In a ruling two years later, Judge Gonzalez Rogers stopped short of declaring that Apple had a monopoly in the market of mobile games, as Epic had argued. That meant Apple avoided the worst possible outcome of the case. But she found that the company had violated California laws against unfair competition by preventing developers from offering users alternative ways to pay for apps.

Last year, Epic complained to the court that Apple wasn’t complying with the ruling because it had created a new set of fees and rules for developers. The judge ordered Apple to provide the documents explaining how it had come up with its new system.

Apple’s documents showed that it tried to discourage alternative payments and keep as much of its traditional 30 percent commission as possible. At a July 2023 meeting, Phil Schiller, who oversees the App Store, advocated that Apple take no commission, but Luca Maestri, Apple’s finance chief at the time, championed a fee of 27 percent. Mr. Cook sided with Mr. Maestri, according to the documents.

Mr. Cook also asked that when people clicked on links to pay for apps outside the App Store they be shown a “scare” screen saying “that Apple’s privacy and security standards do not apply to purchases made on the web.”

“Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers said.

She said Apple executives had “outright lied under oath” and added, “Cook chose poorly.”

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