Hotels 1, Tenants 0

If you want to see why struggling tenants will hate the pro-hotel, anti-Airbnb bill the City Council passed Wednesday, consider the case of Stanley Karol. At a June council hearing, Karol spoke out against the bill, which will force services like Airbnb to hand the city the names and addresses of tenants who list rooms for rent on the companies’ Web sites. Tenants fear that disclosing their names will let officials target them — throttling competition for the hotel industry, which donates heavily to pols’ campaigns.

Sure enough, as if to prove those fears warranted, officials soon targeted Karol, he argues in a suit he filed Wednesday. They claim he converted his basement into an illegal hotel and failed to meet fire codes; fines may come to more than $30,000.

“People shouldn’t have to worry that when they go home, there’s going to be a knock on the door just because they decided to speak up against the government,” Karol’s lawyer, Andrew Celli, argues.

Or because the rooms they rent compete with the hotel business.

Yet to avoid being targeted, or just to protect their privacy, many tenants will just withdraw their rentals from the homesharing Web sites even if they have to lose income needed to pay their rent.

That’s what happened in San Francisco: After it passed a similar law, the city saw a 50 percent drop in Airbnb listings.

Wednesday’s vote showed councilmembers care more about saving their hotel donations than protecting struggling tenants.

“After taking hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the hotel industry, “we’re not surprised” by the vote, Airbnb spokeswoman Liz DeBold Fusco said. “New Yorkers will be subject to unchecked, aggressive harassment and privacy violations, rubberstamped by the City Council.”

Airbnb and tenants must now look to Albany for help. Unlike the council legislation, a bill there would protect tenants’ rights while also acting against illegal rentals. That is, unless lawmakers there, too, become total shills for Big Hotel.