> Yet SoCal suburbs are full of them.

According to google results there's around 10k airbnb listings in san diego, around 1% of households or maybe "less than 2%" by one article.

Even if 30% of new houses ended up causing a bad use like airbnb, all the rest would be still be significantly improving the situation. And you would not be able to balloon the airbnb supply for long until the price drops and a lot of those houses switch to normal rental.

And that's still playing into the "nobody sells a house" situation. Many people would sell houses.

> Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs.

Losing money sucks even if you don't pay taxes on it. But what kind of writeoffs in particular?

> The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.

Which it would not be doing in a situation with significant building. A self-reinforcing supply constriction going to airbnb can't absorb that many houses. I don't think it would survive a doubling in the number of airbnb listings.

And even if the value keeps rising, not having renters loses you a lot of money. Many of those empty houses are going to turn into long-term housing.

> It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.

There's a lot of people in 5 million (or 4,3,2,1 million) dollar houses that cannot afford a second one.