“Not what I moved here for”
Are 1,818 Airbnbs too many in Joshua Tree?
For the past six years, the 10- acre Desert Yacht Club — a 1946 Chris Craft cruiser anchored on a rocky hilltop amid retro trailers near Joshua Tree, Calif. — has been Alessandro Giuliano’s primary source of inspiration, social interaction and income. The off- the- grid glamping site has appeared in the Italian version of Rolling Stone, on lists of epic luxury camping experiences and in films. Giuliano designed everything, including his walk- the- plank setup, which encourages his guests to wobble 2 feet above actual sharks’ teeth to facilitate their imaginations.
Around three months ago, amid tensions with neighbors and a shift in how the Joshua Tree area in southeastern California regulates shortterm rentals and glamping facilities, the 47- year- old Italian artist pulled his last listing off an online booking platform. In order to get a permit — which would satisfy newly enforced rules in San Bernardino County that prohibit renting out most glamping setups on Airbnb, Hipcamp and Vrbo — he’d have to disassemble the club and build a traditional house. This is infuriating, drive anywhere he said, because in the region he cannot without seeing new luxury modernist rentals, whose owners have no trouble obtaining permits. “You put someone out in the desert in a fancy house with a big flatscreen TV and a fireplace on the screen instead of a real fire,” he said, standing in front of his empty Desert Yacht Club. “This is not what I moved here for.” He’s equally resentful of a new wave of visitors that seems to be more interested in mirrored glass and private pools than the desert itself.
Tensions over visitors — some of whom will, inevitably, want to claim a piece of the desert themselves — has been a part of the area’s story for years. But as the pandemic has boosted Joshua Tree’s allure for travelers, transplants and investors, it has magnified old conflicts and created new conundrums.
Desert lovers have long been renovating cabins and setting up
glamping facilities for visitors. The pandemic has supersized that pattern, fueling a sort of gold rush through which investors from Los Angeles, New York, China and elsewhere are rushing in, not just to renovate properties, but to buy land to build homes explicitly for Airbnb and Vrbo.
The pace of growth is staggering. Demand for short- term rentals surged by 54% between 2019 and 2021, making Joshua Tree one of the top two fastestgrowing markets in California and one of the top 25 fastestgrowing markets in the United States, according to data from AIRDNA, a company that collects and analyzes data from Airbnb and Vrbo.
Joshua Tree and the nearby town of Yucca Valley issued 958 permits in 2021, more than nine times as many as they did in
2019, according to San Bernardino County and Yucca Valley data.
As of March, there were 2,043 listings in Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley on Airbnb and Vrbo, more than twice as many as four years ago, according to AIRDNA ( 1,818 are on Airbnb, though some are cross- listed).
Over the past two years, the price of the average home rose more in Joshua Tree and nearby Landers and Twentynine Palms than in any other part of California, according to an analysis by The San Francisco Chronicle. One real estate agent who works in Joshua Tree said that plots are now selling for quadruple 2019 prices.
$ 40,000 plot of land becomes rental gold
I’m standing inside a nearly completed house destined for Airbnb that’s exuding strong villa- in- Bali energy. Or maybe it’s Tulum. It’s hard to believe that just two years ago this was an empty plot selling for around $ 40,000. If it wasn’t for the Joshua trees — their branches jutting out like characters in a Dr. Seuss book around the soon- to- be completed pool — I would not place us in the high desert.
“Wow, Joe, this is beautiful,” said J. Ovier Alvarez, a team leader for Coldwell Banker who sold Zhuo Zhang, aka Joe, the land, as we walk past an electric fireplace embedded in a wall of gray marbled tiles to the bedroom, which features a regal 9- foot- tall headboard. Alvarez had been driving me around the area when Zhang spotted us and invited us in.
“We love art and architecture, you have the space for it here,” said Zhang a few days later as he and his sister, Yihong Zhang, showed us mock- ups for a new compound: four Airbnbs, each with its own pool, that will spell XOXO from above. We were standing inside “the floating box,” designed to appear as if it’s levitating.
Once these and 31 other homes are completed, Somewhere, their property management and development company, will own around 40 rentals. The current nine, which go for $ 250 to $ 1,500 a night, are booked around 90% of the time.
This is impressive considering that just five years ago, the siblings moved to California from Shenzhen, China, without a clear plan, other than that they were ready to move on from advertising and commercial photography ( him) and overseeing real estate matters for Walmart Asia ( her).
But then they stumbled upon Joshua Tree. “It’s a good place to start our American dream,” Yihong Zhang said.
The rise of “high desert boho”
A dream also brought Giuliano, the Desert Yacht captain, to Joshua Tree. In 2013, the installation artist visited and became smitten with the idea of creating art in the desert. He liked that the land he purchased in 2014 lacked electricity or water hookups. He also liked that there were so many artists and musicians.
“It felt like there was a movement starting to take hold,” he said.
In fact, Joshua Tree has been drawing artists, musicians, architectural experimentalists, selfidentified “weirdos” and others seeking inspiration and selfactualization for decades.
But part of what was different when Giuliano towed a 48- foot boat from Pismo Beach, Calif., to the top of his hill in 2016 was the way that many transplants were funding their dreams — by putting glamping setups or cabins on home- sharing websites. Quickly, Giuliano had more requests for his vintage trailers and canvas tents than he could handle.
Around that time, something else was changing that would set the stage for the rental gold rush: an appetite for an emerging aesthetic that some called “high desert boho” or “the Joshua Tree Look” on Instagram.
“In 2017 we started to feel like, ‘ Wow, there is really something here,’ ” said Sara Combs, half of the husband- wife interior design duo behind the Joshua Tree House, a 1949 hacienda- style home about 9 miles east of the Desert Yacht Club.
The house, which they renovated in a palette of neutrals, now has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, a store for “shopping your room” and spinoff inns in Tucson and, soon, Marfa, Texas.
You could also move to the desert, build a stage next to a Joshua tree and start hosting free drive- in concerts after COVID- 19 canceled your violinist husband’s tour. Next thing you know you’d have 50 people there weekly and, annoyingly, guests at a nearby glamping setup — the Desert Yacht Club — zooming by on your private road. This is what happened to Jacqueline Herrera, the owner of the Mon Petit Mojave ranch.
Shards in the dream
Inklings that the gold rush might be spiraling out of control came at different points for various players. Residents who complained about newcomers treating the desert like it was some kind of Wild West playground had been annoyed long before the rise of the Airbnb- Instagram economy. Stories of investors pushing out long- term renters — or sometimes squatters — had also been circulating.
For Herrera, the problems became apparent the week that a “sculpture artist over in a yacht in the middle of the desert” sued her so that he and his guests could take a shortcut on a dirt road that runs across her 15- acre property.
The sculpture artist was the Desert Yacht captain, Giuliano.
In hour five of a seven- hour open forum on short- term rentals in San Bernardino County held in February, I heard Herrera, 35, tell her story. Three weeks later, she stepped out of her Tesla and showed me the dirt road, which begins at a paved thoroughfare and leads up a rocky hill to the Desert Yacht Club.
Initially, Herrera, who works in content marketing in Palm Springs, and her husband, Jeremie Levi Samson, a professional violinist from Paris, got along well with their Italian neighbor, who explained that he often used the road that ran along the border of their two parcels. He could continue to use it, Herrera told him.
But once the pandemic concert series started, Herrera realized that Giuliano’s 30 guests were also going to cross their land, sometimes in the middle of concerts.
“If it was just him, we wouldn’t have a problem,” she said. “But it’s all these party people coming and going and drinking. It’s chaos.”
In January of last year, after the Herreras began telling his guests they were trespassing,
Giuliano sued them.
In some ways their conflict is typical of tensions throughout the region. San Bernardino County received just eight complaints involving short- term rentals in 2019. By 2020, that figure had skyrocketed to 439 before falling to 362 in 2021. Recent community meetings have been punctuated with stories about noisy visitors and overzealous residents threatening to show up with guns.
Suing his neighbors wasn’t personal, Giuliano explained when I tracked him down. In fact, instituting the procedure to get a prescriptive easement — or access to an unofficial road after you’ve consistently used it for five years — is not uncommon. It’s what a lawyer advised him, he said, since there is no official road to his property; even another route — a longer, circuitous path — requires trespassing, he said.
But then the couple countersued in February 2021, and that, said Giuliano, was when he realized that his desert dream might be over. He’d again have this suspicion when he was served with a property violation involving a New Year’s Eve party that his guests were planning. Another violation involving noise had come around the same time he’d gotten a letter from the county telling him that he needed a short- term rental permit or he’d be fined.
He was in a challenging situation, Giuliano said, because there is no clear- cut way to get a permit that allows for renting unconventional structures like trailers or even allowing guests to set up tents. Until the pandemic drove up complaints, no one enforced the rule, he said, something that the county confirmed.
Hundreds of other private campgrounds in the area are now in a similar predicament, according to Mason Smith, the head of government & community relations for Hipcamp, a sort of Airbnb for outdoorsy stays.
The county can’t permit tents, yurts and Airstream camps the same way they do houses because they raise the potential for “safety problems,” said David Wert, a spokesperson for the county.
“When someone sets up a bunch of teepees in the desert and invite people to stay there, where do they go to the bathroom?” he asked.