If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.
Airbnb on Wednesday announced an astonishing $10 million total donation to seven select charities, saying it was a symbolic gesture to show some of the city and state tax revenues it could generate if short-term rentals were allowed.
“It was essentially calculated based on what we think we would be able to collect on state and local sales tax — we think that would be up to $100 million per year — just from Airbnb,” said Josh Meltzer, its director of public policy.
“We just wanted to show what just a fraction the impact would be.”
The home-sharing service hasn’t gotten anywhere pushing its case at the city level, where starting next February a new law will require it to share the names and addresses of Airbnb hosts.
So it has turned to the state, where a measure would allow the company to collect taxes from its customers and permit rentals shorter than 30 days.
The legislation, sponsored in the Assembly by Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn), has been stalled in committee since it was introduced 16 months ago.
Meltzer dangled the $10 million as a possible taste of the windfalls to come if can get rid of the 30-day minimum-rental requirement.
“These are all organizations that typically receive tax money from state government,” he said. “So these are the types of programs that would be funded if we were allowed to remit upwards of $100 million per year.”
Airbnb said it expects to distribute the donations in about 30 days.
Former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who heads one of the charities, Women in Need, said she has no problem accepting a
$1.5 million grant from Airbnb — the largest WIN has ever received — even though some of the company’s listed rentals violate the law.
She said “5,000 people will stay in a WIN shelter tonight . . . 2,700 of them are children.
“My sole responsibility is to those families and to do everything I can and to bring every resource I can to break the cycle of homelessness in an intergenerational way.”
She added that the grant “ will help us triple and quadruple in some cases.”
However, Quinn said “WIN takes no position” on the Albany legislation because it is not directly related to homelessness.
But state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) said “nobody is fooled” by the big donation.
“Airbnb is just another multibillion-dollar corporation trying to bribe Albany into boosting their bottom line and overriding the democratic will of 8.5 million New Yorkers” in the five boroughs.