A self-described “vacation rental investor” and “proprietor of fine Airbnbs” blasted South Lake Tahoe’s short-term rental ban yesterday in a submit on X with over one million views.
Rohin Dhar, who claims to have Airbnbs in Sonoma, Kauai, Taos, Mount Hood, Yosemite, and Asheville, wrote that the resort metropolis’s close to complete ban applied greater than 5 years in the past created a “short-term rental Armageddon.” Nevertheless, as a substitute of easing the housing affordability disaster throughout the metropolis, he claims, “home prices cratered, and people scooped them up as second homes,” and he claims that a few of them are sitting empty.
“There is still a housing affordability crisis … When a resort area bans Airbnb, the only thing that happens is wealthy people get good deals on second homes that mostly sit around vacant,” Dhar wrote on the social media platform, mocking the so-called Measure T.
Measure T was a citizen-initiated poll measure meant to control trip or short-term house leases in South Lake Tahoe, as the city’s website states. It went into impact on the finish of 2018 and required the phasing-out of all trip house rental permits in residential areas and throughout all multifamily properties over a three-year interval. After all, it additionally prohibited new trip house rental permits in residential areas. However Measure T doesn’t apply to present or future short-term leases in nonresidential areas—and a few folks can nonetheless hire their properties, in the event that they’re a everlasting resident and are renting their total house for as much as 30 days a 12 months.
In the summertime of final 12 months, an appeals court docket upheld Measure T’s ban on short-term leases after the South Lake Tahoe Property Homeowners Group filed a lawsuit—though one problem, relating to everlasting residents’ means to hire their properties, was despatched again to trial court docket, according to the Tahoe Every day Tribune, an area paper.
From the tip of 2018 to the tip of final 12 months, house costs in South Lake Tahoe rose roughly 42% to an average home value of $649,322, per Zillow (though they’re down over the previous 12 months). The median rent for all bedrooms and all property sorts within the metropolis is $2,975, which is near 50% larger than the nationwide median.
A recently published opinion piece within the Tahoe Every day Tribune written by Amelia Richmond, president of Locals for Inexpensive Housing, pushed for a emptiness tax, claiming, “As home prices have doubled in the last decade, a staggering 44% of all housing in South Lake Tahoe—over 7,000 homes—now sit empty most of the year. Since 2000, the increase in vacancies has outpaced new housing construction, resulting in more vacant houses and fewer homes for residents.” The housing disaster, she wrote, was pushing locals out of city.
Clearly there’s nonetheless a difficulty of affordability, one which will need to have been worsened by the pandemic-fueled housing growth, which despatched house costs up considerably nationwide, adopted by a surge in mortgage charges. But it surely’s necessary to notice that some analysis has proven that Airbnbs can impression long-term leases. One paper, for example, discovered {that a} short-term rental ordinance in a metropolis in southern California led to a 2.7% decline in contracted long-term rental costs on common—which means, that while you take Airbnbs away, typically rents go down.
“You have oversupplied the market, so people stopped renting their property short-term, [and] they started renting it long-term,” one researcher mentioned on the time. “That’s an increase in supply, and therefore that should put downward pressure on prices, and it did.”
Nonetheless, it is probably not a common phenomenon, relating to rental properties and even location. However most of the time Airbnbs will probably be blamed for contributing to unaffordable housing prices, and property house owners and Airbnb buyers will argue the alternative. Airbnb even employed its first senior housing economist, with a aim to deal with “misunderstandings” in regards to the housing market and Airbnb, according to Skift.
Dhar didn’t reply to a request for remark.
