Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzen Svesterber, your host. On today's show, Airbnb short-term rentals and the right to share your home. As Airbnb and services like Home Away grow in popularity, they're running up against a hodgepodge of local and state regulations.

Joining me to discuss this is Andrew Moylan, senior fellow at the R Street Institute.

Andrew, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

So, Andrew, you recently launched, the R Street Institute recently launched, Roomscore.org.

Tell me a little bit about this website.

So what Roomscore.org is, is a website that displays the latest policy research that we've done,

in this case, on the area of short-term rentals.

And what we tried to do is we looked at 59 cities across the country, and we tried to grade them on their regulatory openness to short-term rental.

And so you mentioned Airbnb. There are other services like Home Away and Flipkey and VRBO,

and they all share a basic structure of providing people a platform to be able to rent out a home

that they own, a property, or a bedroom in their home.

And we're trying to see how open these cities are to that, and that's what room score is.

It's a pretty basic thing.

You know, I either rent a home or I own a home, and I want to rent it out to someone else for a short term.

I mean, why is this even controversial?

Well, it's controversial because there are a lot of folks who would like to see

enormous restrictions in place for these kinds of services. Primarily, we're talking about

the hotel industry, which sees competition, and we're looking at state and local regulators

who, you know, they get very offended when they see

economic activity going on without, you know, extensive involvement from them. And so I think

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