Let us rent out our homes

Iam blessed to have been able to purchase a townhome on a street where redlining kept previous generations of Black families away. New York City is full of examples like mine; each block of each neighborhood has its own special story.

I am a proud Harlem homeowner and I’m committed to staying in the neighborhood I fell in love with. But as costs continue to increase and developers purchase small buildings to knock them down to create luxury apartments or turn multi-unit brownstones into pricey single-family homes, it gets harder for people in small townhomes like mine to hold on. This sent me on the search for a financial solution.

In 2013, in order to cover the costs of maintaining my historic building, I started sharing my home with guests from around the world via Airbnb. While I had originally started renting out my home out of necessity, I grew to enjoy hosting short-term renters. I got to meet people from around the world, make new friends and show them around New York. I loved recommending businesses in the area and seeing New York through the eyes of someone experiencing our great city for the first time. I enjoy offering an affordable alternative to staying in a Midtown hotel to families who sometimes would not have been able to visit had it not been for Airbnb.

This wonderful period came to a halt, however, when the city came knocking at my door in 2017. The Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement (OSE) showed up with four or more agents, including an NYPD officer. I stood alone in my doorway surrounded by people of authority who did not make clear what I had done wrong.

They arrived without contacting me beforehand. They wanted to come into my home “to inspect”; I refused to let them inside. Growing up, my parents always told me to never let law enforcement in without a warrant.

As the officer left, he said with malice, “We have other ways of getting in your house.” They’ve showed up to my home twice now. And I’m keeping them outside.

This isn’t law and order. This is harassment. I have spent years going back and forth with OSE, seeing charges partially dropped, then dismissed and finally having new violations added without giving me any notice or opportunity to defend myself.

In the end, I was hit with more than $10,000 in fees and found myself in the position of being a retired homeowner living in debt.

I have been very vocal on behalf of my fellow New Yorkers and their ability to occasionally share their home. I’ve testified at hearings before the City Council and OSE’s executive director regarding home-sharing. At these hearings, legislators told me their intent is to target illegal hotels, not individuals like me. Even Mayor de Blasio told me the same thing. Well, I am an individual homeowner just trying to make ends meet, and I have not been safe from the city’s inconsistent, confusing, intimidating and costly policies around home-sharing. The city’s enforcement agency is ruthless.

While all that’s bad enough, now some members of the City Council are trying to pass even more draconian restrictions that will surely worsen the behavior of these rogue agents. The new legislation would add incredibly onerous restrictions like requiring every short-term rental host to pay to have their home inspected by an engineer before they can even apply for a permit and it would increase fines to absurd levels.

The biggest problem is that the bill’s language doesn’t even make clear who is eligible to rent their home. I know first-hand what OSE will do with these kinds of vague rules.

This past month, I testified against the new bill at a Council hearing. Once again, I heard politicians using empty words and reciting a lot of random math that didn’t capture the real picture. These critics don’t seem to understand who is actually using these platforms. New Yorkers like me are doing this to afford to stay in our homes. Meanwhile, no one mentioned the 1,000 city-owned lots that have been sitting vacant for more than 50 years that could be used to build affordable housing.

This us-versus-them mentality some of our elected officials are using is truly troubling and the lack of understanding is leading us down a dangerous road. They cannot be trusted to make the right choices when handed a loaded weapon.

Elected officials, if you are reading this, please reconsider this legislation. Welcoming tourists with open arms is part of what makes our city great — and their impact is what stops gentrification right in its tracks. We who rent out our homes short-term aren’t a problem plaguing New York City as it struggles to recover from the COVID pandemic; we’re part of the solution.