This is one of those badly written stories where the author couldn't find a real problem to rile up the public. So he manufactured one by comparing different numbers to try to trick readers into thinking there is a problem. It's comparing
available rental units (i.e. currently don't have a tenant) vs
all Airbnb units. Because Airbnb is short-term rentals, they're always listed as available. Whereas the listing for rental units is dropped once they're occupied.
If you want to compare like-for-like numbers, I couldn't find number of rental units in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. But
63% of units in NYC are rentals. There are
884828 homes in Manhattan,
864790 in Queens, and 1.056 million in Brooklyn. For a total of 2.806 million units. If you assume 63% of them are rentals, that's 1.77 million rental units.
Versus 10,572 Airbnb units. Or 167 rental units for every Airbnb unit. So that would seem to indicate renting your unit to a long-term tenant is much more profitable than renting it via Airbnb. At the very least, much more popular than renting via Airbnb. The opposite of what TFA states.
The only conclusions I'd draw from these stats is that NYC needs more housing units. Based on these numbers, vacancy rate for those three boroughs is only 0.43% (7669 / 1.77 million). Average
vacancy rate for the U.S. overall is 5.8%. So NYC is extremely supply-constrained.
I suppose you could argue the Airbnb units should be rental units. But even if you did that, the vacancy rate would only increase to 1.03%. Still far below the national average, so hardly likely to cause any significant drop in rents. Even if you go by the higher figure of 20397 Airbnb units, and assumed they all became apartment rentals, that would only increase the vacancy rate to 1.57%.
Or put another way, of the 5.4% delta between NYC vacancy rates vs national vacancy rates, Airbnb only accounts for 0.6% - 1.1% of it. The remaining 4.3% - 4.8% is due to other factors.