Balance — not bans — best for Airbnb

Miami Beach is going too far by slapping a $20,000 fine on any property owner who rents his house or extra bedroom on a short-term basis.

So, too, is state Sen. Greg Steube, RSarasota, going too far in trying to ban cities and counties from placing any kind of restrictions on short-term vacation rentals, generally defined as less than six months.

Reasonable regulations are needed to prevent absentee landlords from renting residential properties to rowdy crowds every weekend. Neighbors shouldn’t be expected to endure a dozen cars parked out front, people urinating in the yard and high-decibel music late into the night.

But all or nothing is rarely the answer in public policy disputes, and so it is with the new sharing economy, in which people rent beds, cars, boats, bicycles, gowns and other goods via the internet.

Just as Uber and Lyft disrupted the taxi business, so are home-sharing services like Airbnb and VRBO disrupting the hotel industry in Florida, particularly South Florida.

Business-wise, the playing field became more level last week when Airbnb agreed to collect the county hotel tax from Broward and Miami-Dade hosts who use its site. The agreement could mean as much as $1 million annually for Broward, which charges a 5 percent bed tax; and as much as $6 million in Miami-Dade, which charges a 6 percent bad tax and drives more business on the site.

Miami hoteliers largely came around to support the agreement approved by their county commissioners. Still, they want these new competitors to meet the same regulations required of them, such as the need for fire sprinklers and access for the disabled.

Standing in the way is proposed legislation from Sen. Steube, who wants to prohibit local communities from regulating short-term rentals. Senate Bill 188, now advancing through the Legislature, would be retroactive to June 2011.

Steube told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune he is driven by personal experience. He tried to buy an investment property on Florida’s east coast, but was told local laws prevented short-term rentals. “For me it boils down to a property right,” he told the news outlet.

But property rights aren’t without limit. You can’t convert your suburban home into a gas station. You can’t turn your backyard into a landfill. To protect the greater good — a prime reason why government exists — all sorts of health and safety regulations exist for how you can use your property.

The biggest arguments against homesharing rentals are their impact on affordable

housing and their creation of revolving-door party houses.

But in an interview with the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Airbnb seemed amenable to compromise and offered some examples.

In New York and San Francisco, where homesharing services have contributed to a shortage of affordable housing, Airbnb agreed to limit its hosts to renting only one property.

To address a similar housing shortage in New Orleans, the site agreed to limit hosts to renting their properties for only 90 days a year, excluding people who live in the home and rent out rooms.

Airbnb’s Florida spokesman, Ben Breit, suggests Fort Lauderdale could do better than the registration system it created in November 2015. The city requires homesharing hosts to pay a $750 registration fee, pay county bed taxes and pay $250 for an annual safety inspection, among other things.

Breit said the city’s compliance rate “is extremely low.”

“In Fort Lauderdale, it’s a very onerous process, expensive and time-consuming,” he said. “It’s $750 to register and they’re not doing it.”

City spokesman Matt Little says the system is “still a fairly new program” and the city is doing public outreach. He says 308 homeowners have applied for vacation-rental certificates and 217 have been granted.

But Breit notes that Airbnb has about 1,000 Fort Lauderdale hosts. He believes VRBO, which has been around longer, has even more. VRBO did not respond to a request for comment, but from looking at several sites, it’s safe to say Fort Lauderdale has thousands of short-term vacation rentals. Yet only 217 are licensed by the city.

Given how the industry is evolving, Fort Lauderdale should consider revisiting its system. Breit said that in other communities, when a homeowner registers with Airbnb, their information is provided to the city. And if a host or guest gets too many complaints, Airbnb kicks them off the site.

A recent Mason-Dixon poll found only 26 percent of Floridians believe government should be able to ban homeowners from renting their properties on a shortterm basis. But neither do they want revolving-door party houses on the block.

A reasonable solution lies somewhere in the middle, one that can only be found by backing away from the extreme edges of this dispute.

Besides, if bad actors continue, there’s always next year.

Reasonable regulations are needed to prevent absentee landlords from renting residential properties to rowdy crowds every weekend.