Regarding the short term rental (STR) ordinance last night:
Thank you to all who wrote, called, and commented. When you look at something long enough, you get bogged down in the details, and sometimes you lose sight of specific things that could be addressed, or specific concerns.
If you watched the previous January 25th meeting on this, you know that my stance has been that the spirit of short-term rentals started with homeowners looking to supplement their income by leveraging their home, and that I think that's a great and worthwhile thing. However, the reality is that the average STR owner has changed from a resident supplementing their income to a non-resident using a property exclusively as a business; we had 81 long-term STR's dedicated solely to being a short-term rental, versus 7 that are owner-occupied.
I've been torn between the laissez-faire 'do whatever you want with your private property' and the desire to provide relief to residents experiencing negative effects due to the proliferation of STRs. When an STR becomes dedicated exclusively to business purposes, I do think that they need to be regulated as a business.
I also strongly feel that if we are truly committed to affordable housing, taking more homes off the market to become STRs will exacerbate the lack of options and drive more & more people to search for housing elsewhere. We run the risk of disinvestment in our neighborhoods & schools. We run the risk of reduced federal funding for neighborhood improvements, public health, education and transportation if dedicated STR's continue unchecked (When asked how the census deals with dedicated short-term rentals, they said the property owner is asked to write on the form that “0” (zero) people live there. ). We run the risk of losing that sense of community that drew people to live & invest here in the first place.
I had previously taken a very hard-line stance, believing that our best solution was to simply disallow non-residential/dedicated STRs. However, given the data and that that would leave us at 7 owner-occupied STRs, that just wasn't realistic. It also wouldn't be fair to those people who had invested & employed people in our city to maintain and manage their STRs.
I believe a safe compromise has been reached. The ordinance language focuses primarily on licensing so that we can enforce code and reach property owners/agents when needed, and we allowed for non-residential/dedicated STRs but set a cap on them.
We originally set the cap at 10%, but moved it down to 5%; those who are already running an STR will be legacied in. There is no cap on owner-occupied STRs, so those who are supplementing their income by leveraging their private property are welcome to do so.
I put together a graphic of how the change from 10% to 5% would impact how many non-residential STRs are allowed on a block. Please keep in mind that a 'block' is one side of the street. Also in the case below I assumed each property was one unit; multi-units can change this as each would be counted towards the total number of properties
Read the ordinance referenced here:
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