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19 Chap. L. Rev. 597 (2016)
The Cost of Sharing and the Common Law: How to Address the Negative Externalities of Home-Sharing

handle is hein.journals/chlr19 and id is 621 raw text is: The Cost of Sharing and the Common Law: How to Address the Negative Externalities of Home-Sharing Tristan P. Espinosa* INTRODUCTION Over the past several years, the sharing economy has proven more challenging to regulate than perhaps any other commercial industry in recent decades. An exact definition of the sharing economy is hard to pin down, however, the term is typically thought to refer to companies that either (1) own goods or services that they rent to consumers on a short-term basis, or (2) create peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms connecting providers and users for short-term exchanges of goods or services.1 The variety of companies that embody the sharing economy are as numerous as they are creative, and each presents its own set of regulatory needs and challenges. Yet of the companies that comprise the sharing-economy, the need for regulation is most apparent for companies that provide for home-sharing, such as Airbnb, Inc., HomeAway, Inc., and Couchsurfing International, Inc. Though their respective target demographics differ, each of these home-sharing providers are similar in that they create digital P2P marketplaces that allow users all over the globe to rent and lease empty space in their homes for the short-term. While this practice is economically beneficial in a number of respects (utilization of an untapped resource, financial gain, increased tourism, etc.), oftentimes such benefits come at the expense of others. When a user of one of the above-referenced home-sharing websites lives in a residential neighborhood and lists their property as a short-term rental, they are essentially commercializing a residential area. Unregulated, this activity causes nuisances in single-family-neighborhoods typically associated with commercial activities, such as noise, traffic, and transients. Such nuisances threaten the integrity of single-family * J.D., Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law, May 2016. 1 Daniel E. Rauch & David Schleicher, Like Uber, But for Local Governmental Policy: The Future of Local Regulation of the Sharing Economy 2 (George Mason Law & Econ. Research Paper No. 15-01, 2016).

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