Portland had just become the first city to explicitly allow short-term rentals through Airbnb and other sites, and welcoming Uber could help build the city’s sharing-economy brand, a logical extension of its communitarian roots.
"Sharing economy" is by no means "an extension of communitarian roots". Communitarian is where the utility you derive is in part a function of the utility derived by others in your community. The "sharing" economy is where companies provide a service so you can buy or sell things (your house, car, time etc.) to others in your community. See the difference?
The term 'sharing' is being abused for most 'sharing economy' companies. If you stretch the meaning of sharing to include cash-based transactions, I'm 'sharing' whenever I buy something from a store.
It's an abuse of language just to make these companies sound kinder.
This is spot on. Companies want to have you rent everything from them. Sharing is owned by the community without middle-men deriving rent. Uber and AirBnB just want to avoid regulation and taxes to undercut incumbents and take a bigger cut for themselves.
They have nothing to do with the local community, in fact a global taxi firm degrading workers rights couldn't be further from this.
Sharing is owned by the community without middle-men deriving rent.
By this definition, virtually nothing is sharing beyond maybe volunteer operated community gardens. Virtually every service involves some sort of middle men getting a cut. Even a volunteer run community garden would if gardening supplies are purchased rather than wrought from supplies indigenous to the land.
You're being intentionally obtuse and making a flawed analogy. There is a major difference between a community garden where someone has to go to Home Depot to buy supplies and Uber/AirBnb. In the Garden scenario, Home Depot does not act like Uber as they are not the gatekeepers to your community garden, but instead one (of many) sources for supplies. Home Depot is not rent seeking or deriving rent.
"Much of what counts as sharing turns out to be nothing more than ordinary economic transactions between individuals arranged through digital platforms owned by venture-funded companies that act as middlemen, enabling them to take a percentage off the top."
Disingenuous - its not at all normal to use the family car to give a ride, or rent out your house while you're away. The digital platforms enable everybody to get in the game. Which is a total game-changer.
People have been renting out their homes via CL for over a decade. These "glue" services for AirBnB etc just make that transaction a lot better, and AirBnB takes their cut -- but people could post listings for vacation rentals online forever.
I rented apartments for the weekend in NYC as far back as 2002 off CL.
In theory, the traditional model, which might include a hotel chain in the transaction, would funnel a greater percentage of funds away from the local economy. Under the "sharing-economy" model, more of the funds exchanged in the transaction stay local.
> In theory, the traditional model, which might include a hotel chain in the transaction, would funnel a greater percentage of funds away from the local economy
Do we actually care about the percentage? If you spend $100 on Airbnb and most of that ends up in the local economy that's a lesser local impact than if you spend $250 at a hotel, even if only half of that stays in the local economy.
> But at $100 dollars a night a tremendous amount of people more can afford to stay
That's irrelevant to the comment I was responding to, which was suggesting a transaction with a hotel chain "would funnel a greater percentage of funds away from the local economy" (despite its lack of relevance to the per-transaction discussion you do bring up a valid point which further shows we don't care about the percentage).
> I'd also say, yes, the percentage is important in general.
Why? If more money spent within an economy is beneficial to the economy then you want to maximize the amount of money spent within that economy.
Imagine a hypothetical economy of one person, you. Would you rather have a million dollars taxed at 50% or $100,000 taxed at 5%? Even though the percent you end up with is less you're still going to choose the million because $500,000 is more than $95,000.
What does this mean, really? What is being "shared" with me? Airbnb's pricing in competitive markets is nearly on par with a hotel room. No one is being generous or sharing here. They're asking for what the market can bear. Except I don't get a concierge, daily housekeeping, a gym, a pool, etc.
There's this hypocritical leftist double-speak here where we pretend there's some community building or altruistic aspect at work. There's not. Its just people turning their homes into hotels for massive profit.
Hell, now commercial entities are involved, so that means less affordable rental spaces for local residents because they're just Airbnb money makers now. Now rents/prices go up to reflect the lack of real estate for renters and buyers. You'd think community minded people would care about that. Nope, they just want easy money like everyone else, but somehow they get to pretend they're morally above us all while doing it. Portland hipsters are all about the Benjamins too.
It has nothing to do with the left. The left, such as it is, views the "sharing economy" as the newest innovation in neoliberal capitalist divide-and-rule subjugation.
Really great to see people actually thinking about big business not being your friend on a US web-site.
Now the US has become a finance/rentier economy it's great to see young people questioning business propaganda.
I'm not sure however why you say "leftist double-speak" though. Bloomberg, last time I checked, wasn't left-wing. This is all neo-liberal "free market" / "let's financialise everything" crowd.
Bloomberg didn't coin "sharing economy." This is bay area/valley liberalism and "share" services dominate in more left-leaning urban areas. There seems to be a big appeal of the "Oh, I'm not renting my home out for the money, I'm doing it to help poor travelers, meet new people, fight the 'evil' hotel industry, etc" ethos, which is pretty much bullshit.
For something to be a logical extension, it has to derive from the other. That would mean that the community of Portland would need to benefit from AirBnB rentals as well as the renter and rentee, which seems difficult to prove given the recorded effect of AirBnB in other areas.
The same with Uber - for the "sharing economy" to be a logical extension of communitarianism, the greater population of Portland needs to derive some utility from people providing and using Uber service.
I'm a huge skeptic of Uber's explotative labor practices and general shadiness, and I think "sharing economy" is doublespeak marketing BS. But credit where credit is due, the greater population of Portland might well realize some material benefits from Uber, via reduced drunk driving (or reduced drunk ironic fixed-gear cycling, as the case may be).
It's not a logical extension because most of these "sharing economy" companies are a) subverting the rules and sovereignty of the communities in which they operate, b) introducing parasitic drag in the deployment of capital in those places, and c) creating a disconnect between local owners and local consumers--in effect, you do business with Uber, not Francine the cabby.
Orthogonal to all that, of course, is the generally scummy practice of reducing these folks to serfdom.
Their 'investment' in political influence is amazing:
It has 250 lobbyists and 29 lobbying firms registered in capitols around the nation, at least a third more than Wal-Mart Stores. That doesn’t count municipal lobbyists. In Portland, the 28th-largest city in the U.S., 10 people would ultimately register to lobby on Uber’s behalf. They’d become a constant force in City Hall. City officials say they’d never seen anything on this scale.
I suspected politicians were responding to something besides the appeal of easy-to-get rides. What I've seen from local politicians was hard to explain otherwise.
It is easy to cheer for Uber because they are not running over puppies or snow bunnies, they are dismantling the medallion mafia, unworthy of legal protections. So Yes, I cheer for Uber and its Ayn Randian CEO.
Literally medallions and literally the mafia? Not as far as I know. But most cities restrict supply of taxis to keep prices high and fix prices as the behest of the taxi industry -- in addition to all of the other fun things the taxi lobby does.
When Seattle built the Link light rail system, it stopped 1 mile shy of the airport because the taxi drivers didn't want the competition. Fortunately public outcry shut that down, but it's pretty rare that the general public gets upset enough about an issue to overcome the power of a specific interest group (yes, this includes Uber as well!)
There's plenty of literature to explain why price fixing and limiting supply/licensure is bad. There's no competition, no incentive to improve or provide a premium service. There's no reason to provide service in far-out areas where it might be hard to find a return fare. There's no reason to provide service in less "desirable" (read: minority) areas.
Of course, there are problems with the Uber model, too: Surge pricing being one of them. Some people think it's gouging, some think it's the right solution to provide supply for excess demand.
> most cities restrict supply of taxis to keep prices high and fix prices as the behest of the taxi industry
Why is it always left out that a limited number of taxis is good for society as well? Taxis operate on public roads, pollute public air, cause traffic congestion the public must deal with, cause car accidents and hit pedestrians. When you're not catching a ride taxis (and Ubers) are a nuisance and society has decided to limit their negative side effects.
It's not "elegant" because the people harmed in the parent comment's examples are not customers (or at least a large percentage of them are not). There is no way for them to "vote with their wallets."
? The argument is that there are reasons other than inflating prices to regulate the number of taxis on the road. Cars have externalities that society as a whole pays for, it's reasonable to limit those externalities.
But with limiting taxis you increase the amount of cars on the streets, aren't you? People probably won't stop traveling because there are no free taxis. They jump in their own car.
Not in the cities where I live. They generally park in specific hubs made for them by city planners in front of strategic places like train stations, hotels etc.
It's Germany though..
This is definitely a thing elsewhere. The amount of rudeness that I received from cab company dispatchers in Seattle is astounding. I would much prefer to deal with nearly anyone - Comcast, traffic cops, DOL - than a cab company even today, and there has been a marked improvement in customer support since Uber, Lyft, etc have become a real thing.
They where a monopoly, and they acted like it, and now they aren't.
They offer a service that young people use a lot, and they offer it in a way that makes the service they were using previously look like an embarrassment.
I had to take a cab home from the airport a few weeks ago because my phone was dead. Not only did it cost almost twice as much as an uber would have, but the cab smelled terrible, the driver didn't know where we were going, and when we got to my house, I had to wait for five minutes while he literally made a carbon imprint of my credit card.
Uber has a bunch of, yes, unpaid (in fact negatively paid!) cheerleaders because it's offering a service that people really like.
I've ridden in lots of cabs for many years in many cities, and hardly ever have had an experience like that (not that you didn't this time). I think the Uber-fans are exaggerating the situation a bit (in fact, many Uber drivers are, or were, cab drivers).
Using modern tech for summoning, paying, and rating cabs is a great idea though.
It's also amazing how many (presumably unpaid) cheerleaders the entrenched, corrupt, consumer-harming incumbents have to flood the comments of every discussion about Uber.
Maybe some Uber supporters take "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" to heart. Uber does a lot wrong, and there are a lot of reasons to dislike them, but there are also reasons to cheer their success -- if not some of their methods.
I'm fine with describing Uber that way too. I didn't go out of my way to do so, because I was replying in-kind to someone who was asking why people defend Uber; I was merely pointing out the same could be said of the Taxi industry.
OTOH, here in Connecticut they didn't have a lobbyist firm, and they almost got banned in the state (after already running for a few months), because the taxi companies were lobbying the politicians. So they hired a lobbyist, and got actual hearings on the subject. Which seems a bit more fair.
Uber has been treated roughly by local politicians pretty much everywhere in the world it has set up. It's only by fighting the taxi lobbies with fire that they have been able to make any inroads at all.
Uber accounts for nearly half of the entire U.S. market of low-cost personal rides. They are not the little guy fighting the power, they are the power.
Not only themselves but drivers and customers too. Uber, their drivers and their customers benefit from not being covered by those labor laws you're talking about.
It's bad for politics and the traditional taxi industry because they get less from the cake.
I seriously don't know: Is that somewhat out of proportion? I could imagine the aggregated Taxi lobby being represented somewhere close to that. It's after all a highly regulated market.
I can't imagine the taxi lobby has $40 billion and former White House advisors. The article says that Portland city hall was blown away by scale of Uber's response.
Nothing new here. Lobbying is just legalized corruption. Lobbying works if you put enough money in lobbying politicians and since Uber is mostly popular... There is no way around it, the taxi industry as we know it will vanished. But I don't really want Uber to be the 'new boss'...
What's most pathetic is that the peasants take up arms for Uber to crush any resistance. It drives me nuts. Sure, you love Uber, I love the service they provide too, but there are always consequences when you get in bed with the devil.
I wonder if there is a way to take the corruption out of lobbying.
Imagine a public area where lobbyists could post lobbying materials (videos, notes, slides, research, etc) and then the public could have a way to like the ones they thought were the most important.
As the most liked issues filtered up there could be a team of public (since governments a bad word to some people) fact checkers who would check the claims asserted, and put out possibility estimates.
From there there'd have to be some sort of action plan committee which would commission experts to make proposals and evaluate the presented solutions.
And from there, things would start to happen.
Private lobbying would only be legal when all presentations, correspondence, and meetings were recorded and transcribed for public release.
Of course, this requires a tremendous amount of effort on the publics part and a well connected and engaged public. It may be that a politician would be elected based on the team of 15 lobby likers he presented (or some such idea). If those lobby likers focused on some of the same issues the electorate wanted to focus on they'd elect that guy.
It's far fetched and would probably require publicly funded elections, but, shit, it's gotta be better than the no holds barred, resolutely opaque, money begotten system we have today.
Lobbyists certainly have a place, but they shouldn't be the only ones with the official's ears.
I've thought about the problem before, and I think a good model is the judiciary. You can "lobby" the Supreme Court, but only via amicus curiae[1] briefs.
This preserves the benefits of lobbying (conveying to the ruler that "if you do this, you will cause this bad thing"), but makes it more obvious when someone is receiving bad arguments.
Unfortunately, representatives aren't required, like the Supreme Court, to declare "I'm voting this way because of these considerations", and it's not a 100% good thing either -- sometimes there are politically sensitive compromises where candor is punished at the polls.
It's interesting that Lyft seems to be able to hypermile behind Uber and benefit from the lobbying without having to spend any money. Google and others who eventually deploy self driving car fleets will benefit as well.
Which still doesn’t solve the actual issue: affordable public transport.
Especially in cities taxis are just inefficient. They use over 10 times as much space as a similar amount of busses, and produce a lot more emissions per passenger, too.
Self driving car fleets for rent or taxis are good for rarely used routes, or for city - region transport, but inside a city taxis should be mostly replaced with proper subway and bus systems.
How low would a self driving 2 seater smart car have to drop in cost before you would view it as an acceptable replacement to public transportation in cities without strong existing subway routes? I think the costs will be surprisingly low, and the infrastructure (roads) already exists from door to door. No matter what, self driving cars will siphon off some percentage of riders from public transport options, increasing the need for ever more expensive subsidies.
Especially in european cities with a historic core, this is just not the case - even in my city, it's common knowledge to NEVER take a car into the city, as the roads are just always fully congested.
Public Transport is the only long term solution. Especially when one takes the cost for building roads into account. And if one considers that with public transport 100% of the fare goes back into the infrastructure, while with self-driving cars operated by for-profit businesses most of your fare ends up in the pockets of a rich investor overseas. Which is just not desireable.
You might be wrong even for a planned city: individual cars are convenient, fast and safer than public transport (picture women and minorities who get harassed--human drivers are going away fast and people's bigotry are not). Experts reckon self-driving traffic will reduce cars on the road by an order of magnitude, so that we'll only need 5% of current cars to provide pinpoint, individual and mostly immediate service to everyone. 30% of all traffic is caused by parking alone. It really seems like small electric two-seater cars (whatever form they take) are the future. That most cities are already prepared in terms of roads is icing on the cake.
That said, if it happens, these self-driving cars should BECOME public transport, a common good, of course. Not some corporation's private automaton army of money-printing cars, even though Uber really is helping speed up the whole transition. I think Europe and perhaps Latin America will have better luck escaping Uber's monopoly claws and bringing service into the commons.
It drives me nuts to see the manic crowds come to the defense of Goliath. Sure, taxi's suck ass in many cities and I really like the accountable based system of Uber and their high standards, but that is no justification for essentially handing over a whole market segment to a single monopolist.
What an age we are living through, where all the valued and ideals of competition aren't even given lip service anymore and all of society goes all in on monopolies. Because what can go wrong when monopolies reach the phase where they turn all those lobbyists from market capture goals to regulatory capture goals to lock out any competition in an inherently low barrier to entry industry? Nothing can go wrong, right?
> handing over a whole market segment to a single monopolist.
So long as the regulations aren't specific to Uber, what's to stop Lyft, Sidecar and others from competing in the same space? It seems like in this case, the monopoly is taxies, and the disruptor is still ridesharing services.
"City-level battles can be costly, too. Last year, Uber put more than $600,000 into a voter referendum in Seattle and spent $314,000 lobbying in Washington, D.C."
That is not costly. Uber has raised $6 billion in capital, and is presently working on a $2 billion line of credit. Half a million dollars per major metro, would be trivial - but it won't be necessary, for every Portland, there are a dozen smaller cities that will just fall in line.
> But as Portland would learn, a city of 600,000 can play tough with a $40 billion company, particularly one that is used to getting its way, for only so long.
We will not have to wait long until Uber lobbies for "Uber medaillons", the equivalent of the (once) powerful taxi lobby shutting down other competitors.
The reason why Uber and Airbnb are able to succeed, at least in NYC (and perhaps SF, ....) is the use of politics to create artificial scarcity ("rent seeking"). In NYC there is an artificial limit on Taxi Medallions so that a medallion until recently could cost $1 million. Housing and hotel costs are so high because of zoning laws that have unrealistic and artificial housing density restrictions, thus increasing the cost of land, thus increasing the cost of housing and office space.
Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser (cited by Nobelist Paul Krugman and others) wrote this: (Build Big Bill)
Thus, Uber and Airbnb owe much of their success to addressing market inefficiencies, "rent seeking" introduced by bad laws which serve special interests at the cost to people who take taxis, rent and buy apartments, and rent office space.
Lol, I like the sharing economy as much as the next person, but it's a pretty ludicrous name for itself. There's not really any sharing to be found here, just buying and selling.
Once the companies involved start being more reasonable with paying taxes and employees instead of trying to essentially skirt the law and be irresponsible corporate citizens, they'll be a great addition to our economy. As of right now, they just make a lot of money for a few people at the expense of the rest just like any other Mega-Corp would.
I like to think the tech community tries to make the world better rather than just scrounge for cash, but maybe I'm too much of an idealist.
Why does every article about Portland make it into some magical incredibly different place. Does water not run downhill in Portland, OR?
I spend a fair amount of time in Portland and it's incredibly similar to most American cities. All this exceptionalist serves only to stroke egos and generate clicks.
Uber is a great example of why lobbying can be a good thing. Taxi regulations date back to the days of horse-drawn carriages. That does not by itself make them obsolete, but at the time taxi regulations took their modern form, cities (especially on the east coast) were more densely populated, cars were much more polluting, and there was little that would allow disseminating information about the quality of taxi service among consumers. In short: the externalities and information asymmetries that justified taxi regulation in the first place have declined substantially.
Lobbyists are well-positioned to inform legislators about how the market is different today, and why the animating purposes of taxi regulations may no longer be applicable, or at least may not have the same force they used to.
Lobbyists take the facts and portray their clients in the best light possible. Other lobbyists can take other facts and undermine those narratives. It's a combative process that is pretty good at ferretting out conflicting evidence because the parties involved have strong incentives to elicit that evidence.
The alternative is "neutral" fact-finding by unelected technocrats. I'd rather have a system where the environmentalist lobby and the coal lobby fight it out than rely on some bureaucrat to come up with his version of the facts with no input from anyone else.
Taxis and taxi-like services have costs, like increased congestion and pollution, which are borne by everyone in the area they're operating, but which are not really in the interest of any of the major players in the lobbying picture.
They have nowhere near the resources of commercial groups and they don't get nearly as much access. Anyway, "there are environmental groups" seems like a facile response because pollution is only one of the costs of adding more cars driving around in circles all day to the streets.
Government administers regulations on behalf of the people. If they're failing to do so then the political process is broken. Lobbyists do not fix broken political processes.
> Uber had been working on the council members for months. “They kinda run this,” Alpert said in February. “I keep feeling they will just wear you down. If we end up in court, we will have to lose just based on resources.”
This doesn't sound like they're simply informing legislators of new information nor does it sound like the legislators had the resources or the time to do anything but roll over.
I'm not a lobbyist, though my wife used to be. She lobbied on behalf of a construction trade organization. 98% of her work involved telling legislators about the benefits of integrating design and build phases of construction (instead of hiring a separate architect and contractor and doing design and build in separate phases).
Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people. Do you think politicians should be sitting around reading papers about the reputation economy and thinking about where those ideas can be applied? It would be intractable and a huge waste of time considering the vast universe of concerns involved. And it's not like ordinary citizens are clamoring writing letters about how the reputation economy enabled by smart phones makes certain taxi regulations obsolete. It's far better for lobbyists to do the relevant work and tell politicians what they should fix and why.
"Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people"
Or does it "shift responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to" corporations looking to maximize their financial benefits, regardless of its impact on society?
The entire point of elected officials is that their decisions aren't based on who has money. If we depend on lobbyists then only companies big enough to afford them get a seat at the table. That's a plutocracy.
> Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people.
Wait, are you asserting that corporations are people? Uber is not a person and the article suggests that they used their considerable power to take the decisions regarding their regulations out of the hands of the government officials of Portland and thus farther away from the people of Portland.
> Government administers regulations on behalf of the people.
Is that meant to be descriptive? Because I don't know where to start. "The people" isn't even an entity expect in a defunct branch of classical political philosophy.
And I do think this isn't an ideological claim. I believe this could be stated by socialists, libertarians, democrats..
"Sharing economy" is by no means "an extension of communitarian roots". Communitarian is where the utility you derive is in part a function of the utility derived by others in your community. The "sharing" economy is where companies provide a service so you can buy or sell things (your house, car, time etc.) to others in your community. See the difference?