If you live in a place where people like to go to have fun, good for you. But if your fun place is full of Airbnbs or other short-term rentals, you may also suffer as revolving hordes of neighbors-for-the-weekend throw parties and blast music into the night.
Last October, a resident in Scottsdale, Ariz., woke to the sound of partygoers shooting guns. The bullets hit five nearby homes. On Cape Cod, firefighters were called to an Airbnb rental after carousers had the not-bright idea of moving a fire pit onto the wooden deck.
COVID-19 put a crimp in travel, and that has delivered some peace to beach, college, city and other neighborhoods that have seen themselves overrun by party rentals. But with spring in the air, COVID in retreat and considerable pent-up demand for cutting loose, the disturbances may come back with a vengeance.
Thus, here and abroad, there have been hot battles between full-time residents, owners of short-term rentals and Airbnb, which provides the platform linking hosts with guests. Expect more as travel season heats up.
Airbnb’s line has been that its hosts are regular folks briefly renting out a room to help pay the electric bills. Not quite. About half of Airbnb’s listings are managed by people with two to 20 properties, according to Transparent, a software company serving the rental operators. And 14 percent of hosts have 21 or more. They are basically running unregulated hotels.
Locals often don’t know who the landlords are. That means they don’t know whom to complain to when the bachelorette party next door plays catch outside with a 3-foot inflatable phallus, as happened on Cape Cod. And when they do, the owner often tells them to get lost.
“What I’m doing, I’m entitled to do,” the owner of a said party house told NBC10 news in Boston. “You can’t restrict somebody from doing what they want to do with their property within the law.”
The law can change. Denver, Boston and Santa Monica, Calif., are among the many cities that have tightened rules for these rentals. But that’s because their states let them do it.
Arizona has a law that forbids cities from regulating short-term rentals, although there are efforts to overturn it. Airbnb is now supporting a bill in the Arizona legislature that would penalize short-term-rental hosts who violate local laws.
The spread of these vacation rentals has spawned another controversy here and in Europe. It’s created a scarcity of rentals for year-round residents. The mayor of the picturesque and popular Sedona, Ariz., Sandy Moriarty, says Airbnb rentals have “demolished the long-term rental market,” forcing residents to move out. She implied that they were at least partly to blame for the closing of an elementary school.
In Dublin, where the number of homes on Airbnb rose from 1,700 full-time listings in 2016 to over 4,500 right before COVID hit, rents skyrocketed for full-time residents. The Irish government has put in place regulations to move short-term rentals back onto the long-term market, but they are apparently very hard to enforce.
Interestingly, as the coronavirus squeezed tourism to a near halt, many short-term rentals have again become long-term. As a result, Dubliners are suddenly seeing more affordable rentals, much to their delight.
What’s going to happen now that the engines for mass travel are starting to rev? There will be more battles pitting property rights against residents’ rights to a good quality of life. What should seem obvious through all this, though, is that the most problematic hosts are the commercial operations. Local governments should be able to regulate them for what they are.
Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.
