You may have followed the vote in last week’s San Francisco election where Airbnb was on the ballot. The ballot initiative was designed to put Airbnb out of business. The ‘no’ vote was exactly 55% which is technically a victory. It was a sad loss.
Airbnb has been dealing with politics from a Lefty perspective. The political leader is Chris Lehane who believes in sandbox politics. Chris is a goody-goody in a field where that is a prescription for disaster. It has damaged the half dozen other well established home rental businesses that have been thriving in San Francisco for decades. The others have intelligently remained below the political radar.
Airbnb started active political work about four years ago. They worked with Lefty politicians to craft legislation that would have Airbnb paying the hotel tax. The people they worked with wanted far more stringent restrictions and put them in the legislation we now have. The legislation easily passed the Maoist city council a year ago. It was so stupidly written that it turned out to be unenforceable. So a new law was crafted to create two new city government agencies.
Having awakened the child eating Lefty dragon that thrives in San Francisco, the dragon put an initiative on the ballot to kill Airbnb for a last time.
When the initiative lost by only 55% the dragon knew it hadn’t lost. If the loss had been 60% the dragon would have been slain, never to put another initiative on the ballot and forced to standby as the earlier legislation was unenforced by the city government.
That didn’t happen and the true Luddites who want to stop all tech progress are fully armed and ready to fight more and more often.