Robert Desir, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society’s Civil Law Reform Unit, has penned a new op-ed for the New York Daily News, warning of Airbnb’s efforts to overturn laws that protect New York City’s neighborhoods.

The changes Airbnb is proposing, via a series of last-minute bills, would gut the protections in Local Law 18. It would allow speculators to buy homes, claim them as their primary residence, and convert them to full-time, luxury short-term rentals while living elsewhere.

“It’s easy to see where this leads. Under these bills, nearly every unit of permanent housing could be converted to a short-term rental when no resident is present,” Desir writes in part. “That would explicitly encourage large-scale investors and private-equity firms to buy rental properties from the very homeowners Airbnb is promising to protect. It would lead to an explosion of short-term rentals again, to the detriment of both renters and homeowners.”

“For years, New Yorkers have watched helplessly as speculative investors, and private equity vultures hollowed out our neighborhoods and turned communities into commodities,” Desir writes. “Local Law 18 was the city’s promise to do better — to put people before profit, and to preserve housing for New Yorkers first.”

Read the full piece here.