New York State law draws a clear, deliberate line between two kinds of buildings. A private dwelling is a home occupied by one or two families as a common household — a place where the residents share a single living arrangement, even if extended family or a boarder is part of it. A multiple dwelling is a building occupied by three or more families living independently of one another — apartment buildings, tenements, the kind of housing stock built and regulated for commercial-scale occupancy from the ground up.

This distinction isn't new, and it isn't incidental. It predates the platform economy by nearly a century, and it exists because a family living in its own home isn't running a business, and the law has never treated it as though it should. A private dwelling carries minimal state regulation and a high degree of autonomy and privacy — the kind of protection Americans generally assume applies to their own front door. A multiple dwelling, by contrast, is subject to the Multiple Dwelling Law, fire codes, structural requirements, and density rules built for buildings that function more like small commercial operations than private homes.

The practical test courts have used to police this line is whether a building is used "as a rule" for transient, hotel-like occupancy — meaning the majority of its use, not the exception. Occasional short-term use doesn't convert a private home into a hotel any more than packing a few extra passengers into a car turns it into a school bus. The vehicle's purpose doesn't change just because it's carrying more people for one trip.

Understanding this distinction matters before anything else in this record makes sense. Every legal argument that follows — about Local Law 18's reach, about the federal lawsuit's constitutional claims, about why the fight over Intro 948 and its successors exists at all — traces back to this one line the law already drew. The fight was never about inventing a new right. It's about enforcing one that was already there.