Short-term rentals, neighborhood safety can coexist

When Americans think of Florida, they think of sun, sand and vacation. The old state tourism jingle, “When you need it bad, we got it good— come to Florida!” still rings true. Millions of tourists descend on our state each year. And when those tourists come to Florida, they need a place to stay. More and more, those places to stay are the homes of individuals who rent their homes out on a short-term basis.

For this reason, it is good to see state Rep. Mike LaRosa (R-St. Cloud) propose HB425, a bill that allows homeowners to offer their homes to visitors as short-term rentals. His bill, which recently passed a House subcommittee, is a much needed step to protect private property rights.

Home-sharing is a longstanding tradition in the Sunshine State. The Internet has enabled homeowners and travelers to connect better than ever before, and online homesharing platforms such as Airbnb and Homeaway help thousands of Floridians rent rooms or houses to help pay their bills. Twenty-one percent of Florida homeowners use rental income to pay for their child’s education, 70 percent of owners use income for renovations or upgrades, and 11 percent save for retirement. According to a recent poll from Mason and Dixon, 93 percent of Floridians support home-sharing.

Yet a growing number of cities in Florida are trying to ban short-term rentals, sticking homeowners with astronomical fines and penalties. Recently, the City of Miami Beach voted to impose fines of $20,000 on home-sharers, among the heftiest fines in the country. These regulations inflict untold costs on communities, destroy opportunities for homeowners to improve their local economies by renting to people who will patronize local businesses, and punish the responsible majority of property owners for the potential wrongs of a few.

Fortunately, not all states are undermining property rights. For example, last year, Arizona passed landmark legislation protecting home-sharing statewide, based on a model law drafted by the Goldwater Institute. That another tourism-centric state like Arizona saw fit to protect the rights of its homeowners to benefit from tourism dollars should suggest to our Legislators in Tallahassee that they need the same protections.

Unfortunately, some Florida city officials have objected to these laws because, they say, they trample on local community authority. Obviously local governments should protect neighborhoods against nuisances, and existing laws already give them plenty of authority to do that.

HB425 does not undermine local authority. Cities and towns will still be able to restrict nuisances, noise, and crime. Existing ordinances already do that by targeting specific wrongful behavior. For instance, cities do not forbid all backyard barbeques just because some might get noisy— they enforce reasonable restrictions on noise, while respecting people’s rights to use their property. That is all HB425 does. It allows local governments to adopt regulate rental properties in ways that protect public health and safety, but prevents the kinds of draconian bans that cause more problems than they solve.

Local one-size-fits-all prohibitions on home-sharing, on the other hand, are intrusive, encourage neighbors to spy on each other, and distract cities from addressing nuisance and the police from fighting actual crime. That local autonomy is beneficial is not an excuse for enabling the government to intrude on important rights like property and privacy.