A couple of years ago we stayed at a lovely cottage in Lanikai on the island of Oahu, and we mean to stay there again. We just received an email from the owner stating that a new law passed in Oahu charging huge fines for people renting out their home or apartment outside of resort zones. In Oahu, the resort zones I assume mean Waikiki and some points north (that Disney place).
This sucks. I hate hotels and resorts, and I assume that it’s the big resort owners that are behind this new law. I want to stay in a peaceful cottage in a quiet neighborhood, dammit.
It’s also the neighbors who aren’t renting and don’t want a short-term rental property next door to them.
If I were I neighbor, I’d probably feel the same way. As someone who prefers staying in a house versus a hotel/resort, I’d be disappointed if that was no longer an option. Someone comes out a loser either way.
Also in many vacation destinations there is extremely limited housing stock and no ability to build more. The lower paid workers get pushed out of any realistic housing options when some of that housing stock is converted to short term rental space. The folks with money will find somewhere to live by bidding up prices, but the blue collar workers who are needed end up with no place to stay. In order to remain viable, the communities need to keep owners from converting their 2nd homes to short term rentals.
It also makes it harder for residents to find housing. Investors snap up all the properties for vacation rentals, making housing more expensive and harder to find for people who live there. I agree with you that I’d prefer to stay in a regular place rather than a hotel, but I also want the city to be a real place with real residents rather than just filled with tourists.
This has become a serious problem in the Lake Tahoe area in recent years. With investors buying up everything for vacation rentals it’s apparently become nearly impossible for people who actually live there to find housing. Or at least housing they can afford. Being a touristy area most people there work in the service industry.
I like being able to stay someplace other than a hotel or resort when I travel, too. It feels more homey and less touristy. But I’m also sympathetic to the problems it creates for locals. It’d be nice if some sort of a compromise could be found. I’m not sure what that would look like. Maybe a limit on vacation rentals in a particular area rather than an outright ban?
Yeah, I sympathize with neighbors who don’t want noise and traffic right next door and also with people trying to find a place to live that hasn’t been bought up by people looking to rent it out. I didn’t realize there were so many buyers speculating in rental housing.
Maybe a solution is to grandfather in the folks who have been doing this for years and years, like my Lanikai connection. She lives right next door to the rental, and depends on the income from this property. And also, as you say, to have a cap on the percentage of short-term rentals in a given neighborhood.
We’re the type of renters who the owners prize and the neighbors would never notice: old, quiet, non-smoking and clean. And just the type to hate noisy, partying hotels.
There is also the loss of tax dollars to the city. Hotel taxes are a really easy way for a locality to raise revenue - residents don’t pay it so they don’t care if politicians vote them in. But if that revenue dries up from hotels because people are renting out their condos as short term rentals and not collecting hotel taxes, then the revenue needs to be made up other places - places the locals notice like restaurants, sales tax. Or services decline.
Not to mention that (I’ll bet) hotel owners are powerful politically on Oahu, being rich and all, and it is to their interest too to clamp down on the competition, i.e. private parties doing short term rentals.
In view of the linked blog, it’s odd that so many apparent privately owned short term rentals are still online taking reservations. Does this new law apply to condos too?
She can sell the property and invest the proceeds. I’m sure you are good renters, but if she keeps it rented all year long no doubt there are bad renters.
I’m a big fan of AirBnB, and have used it all around the US and in Europe, but I understand cities and states restricting it. The original concept was sharing empty rooms and empty couches, but it has become an independent hotel industry. Maybe the solution is to regulate and tax it (like some places are doing) to put them on an even footing with hotels.
In Barcelona part of the problem is the short-termers peeing/shitting in the halls and on the street. Our homeless don’t and the tourists do :smack: They’re also likely to mistreat the common areas in other ways (most of our housing is apartments/tenements) and to arrive at FuckThisShit O’Clock making a ton of noise.
And an absurd amount of the official “rental apartments” in Spain are the property of a single huge company, or rather holding. They’ll do things such as buy several flats/stores in one building and place them under different names so they get several votes in the building’s council (votes are by owner, not by unit), then try to drive other people out. Part of the problem is that, since nobody thought this could happen, it’s immoral but not illegal. And part of the problem is that attempts at fixes are coming at the municipal level and causing more harm to those actual independents which are working legally than to the holding. Of course, yet another part of the problem is that very often the people working AirBnB and suchlike are doing so under the table and with no supervision; bad situations can run from discovering that your rental is shared to finding it practically gutted by the previous, oh so lovely, occupants.