COMMENT: Would you believe it – some of our prime inner city properties are being given over to Airbnb and their ilk. And once again, City of Sydney councillors are adopting surrender as their only option.

I’m not one to say “I told you so” … well, actually I am and I’ve been telling readers of various publications so for the past 15 years.

Now, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, City of Sydney Greens councillor Matthew Thompson wants to impose a 60-day cap on holiday rentals in the city centre, just like the one in Byron Bay.

He shouldn’t expect to get much support from his fellow councillors who are already hiding behind the “there’s no perfect solution so let’s not try anything” surrender tackle.

CoS deputy mayor Jess Miller is quoted as saying a cap would be too hard to enforce to be effective, and that it would be too easy for hosts to find loopholes. Both of these things are true if you aren’t prepared to even try.

City of Sydney has a pretty poor track record in this regard. Nine years ago, I was due to address a community meeting on strata, run by CoS, only to be replaced at the last minute by none other than Clover Moore herself.

Apparently she opened the meeting by announcing that they would not be discussing Airbnb – which was met by howls of protest and she ended up having to address the issue after all.

Why was I bumped – apart from the fact that she is a better public speaker than me? Maybe it had something to do with this article headlined How City of Sydney betrayed strata residents.

It opens with the line “It’s probably  too early to gauge the effect of City of Sydney’s betrayal of apartment residents when it comes to holiday letting – but it’s somewhere between a kick in the guts and smack in the mouth.” Yeah, I would have bumped me too.

So now, Clover and Co, your chickens have come home to roost and it’s just not good enough to say – we can’t do anything now because we didn’t do enough back when we could.

Meanwhile, planning minister Paul Scully says the answer is to build more hotels. This from a government that’s struggling to build enough homes.

The whole question of short-term holiday let platforms forcing out long-term tenants has been around ever since Airbnb weaselled its way into the fabric of our housing.

Its campaigns are smugly misleading, issuing bogus statistics and highly dubious surveys to back spurious claims that it doesn’t make any difference to the local people where it has taken root and metastasised.

Occasionally, it is exposed for what it is. The fury from Airbnb HQ was palpable when the NSW Tenants Union rebutted claims that renters supported short-term rentals. As if the people who are kicked out of their homes would back the agency that encourages and facilitates their eviction.

Airbnb has for years presented itself like a social service – helping people pay their levies, for instance – while behaving with the same moral rectitude as vape and dodgy cigarette shops: if they can’t enforce the law, you don’t have to obey it.

All of this has been happening under our noses and our politicians have done nothing meaningful. Every time they try to address the problem, they only create vague rules that embed the business even further in our society – like a splinter in your finger that only goes deeper when you try to squeeze it out.

The original concept of Airbnb was great – share your home with a visitor and show them your city or town. Now it’s just an uncaring, unaccountable, monolithic rental agency for houses and flats that should be homes for families.