Lake Placid faces Airbnb dilemma
Village grapples with spike in new rentals; hosts say they fill pressing need for housing
Depending on where you live, renting out your home to tourists over the Internet can be an easy way to make money. But a surge in such rentals in the historic heart of the Adirondack High Peaks has sparked soul-searching over what it can mean for a small, but tight knit, community.
Nestled among the state’s tallest mountains, the village of Lake Placid has long been a destination for outsiders who want the alpine experience, twice hosting Winter Olympics that drew tens of thousands of visitors from around the globe.
Such tourism has long been a lifeblood for the village’s 2,400 people, its thriving downtown of shops and restaurants and an array of resorts, hotels, motels, bed-and-breakfasts — and more recently, a rapidly growing web of private homes renting through Airbnb and other Internet services.
Last month, the trend led to a packed house before local lawmakers who are weighing rules on how to contain it.
Proposed by the village of Lake Placid
and the town of North Elba, the law could require owners to get permits and be available to quickly address complaints from neighbors. Other requirements could set minimum stays, limit the number of guests in a home, and even ban such renters from using property access to Lake Placid or Mirror Lake.
Some longtime residents are complaining about crammed homes, renters’ cars filling up residential streets, and noisy alcohol-fueled nighttime parties. And since a home rented out to tourists can turn a hefty profit, such rentals are driving up home prices beyond the reach of locals who live and work there.
But owners of such homes say the village and town, which have been looking at rules since last summer, might be going too far, depriving property owners of the ability to earn money and sending out an anti-business message.
“There is not a neighborhood in the village that is not being affected by this,” said Lake Placid Mayor Craig Randall, a 76-year-old village native who grew up skiing in the nearby mountains. “Such rentals in residential zones are neither prohibited nor recognized under our zoning. The question is how can we make this use compatible without screwing up a community.”
There are currently about 300 Airbnb hosts in the village, who last year had about 26,000 people stay over, according to figures provided by company spokeswoman Liz Debold Fusco.
Since its founding in 2008, Airbnb has continued to grow as more people turn to it as a way to make money. It currently has 2.9 million hosts worldwide, and is adding 14,000 new hosts every month, according to its website.
Last week, the Airbnb website showed more than 300 potential lodging sites for Lake Placid, with an average nightly rate of $357. Fusco said the typical host in the village earned about $12,600.
One of those hosts is Huda Scheidelman, a Hudson Valley resident with a second home in the village and a spokeswoman for Gold Medal Hospitality, a coalition of about 40 homeowners doing online rentals.
“Wealsocarealot about Lake Placid, and want to help the town to preserve the peace of the town,” she said. Issues like insufficient parking and tenant misbehavior should be addressed, she agreed.
But, said Scheidelman, restrictions should not constrain the ability of property owners to tap into a growing demand for lodging. She said the proposed law’s threenight minimum stay would discourage weekend travelers. Also a limit of 16 renters per residence — based on a formula of two people per bedroom plus two — would crimp potential revenue.
And she questioned proposed penalties that could sock property owners with fines up to $1,000 and even jail time for the first offense.
“Lake Placid needs lodging,” said Scheidelman. “One of our downtown hotels is expanding, and there are two new hotels in the works ... this is all good news for Lake Placid. There is no reason why short-term lodging cannot peacefully coexist.”
Village officials welcome economic benefits from tourism, said Randall. But he said shortterm rentals can make a house more valuable as an online rental than as a family home, which is driving up real estate prices in the village.
That is pricing out some residents who live and work there year-round. “Homes that were going in the 300s (thousand dollars) are now suddenly worth 400, 450,” said Randall. “And then we have new owners who live elsewhere who want to start recouping their investment with shortterm rentals.”
The mayor also said more homes in the village owned by people who live elsewhere also threatens the fabric of the community by reducing the presence of full-time residents. Some locals even fear that it will reduce the number of school-aged children in the village and undermine the vitality of the school system.
“We host a lot of events here, and the volunteers who support that come from our residents, who live here and work here,” said Randall. “You do not find the weekend people who own second homes engaging in that. They are here to relax.”
He said he does not want to see Lake Placid gradually turn into a Jersey shore-style tourist town, where almost everything closes up and stops once the season comes to an end. “We do not want to lose the culture and character of our village.”
And the mayor urged Airbnb and its hosts to do a better job “vetting” renters for potential problems. “With no local management or oversight, things can get out of hand,” said Randall. “I do not want to see the village have to be the enforcement agent for every complaint that deals with that kind of activity.”
The presence of online rentals is rapidly growing in Lake Placid and the rest of Essex County, said James Mckenna, CEO of the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism, which covers Essex, Franklin and Hamilton counties.
Last July, there were nearly 750 Airbnbs in Essex County with 2,239 available bedrooms, he said. That is slightly more than the 2,200 rooms available in resorts, hotels and other traditional lodging businesses in the county.
That is a sharp increase from the summer of 2016, when the county contained 280 rentals on Airbnb, according to a report at the time in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
“We are seeing that some units are more valuable as rentals rather than as residences,” said Mckenna. “And we are seeing that in some cases, some neighborhoods are converting from residential to rental.”
Short-term renters tend to be younger than those who stay in traditional lodging, according to a survey by Mckenna’s group. And they stay longer, an average of 4.4 days, compared to 2.7 days for traditional guests.
By staying longer, short-termers devote more spending on lodging — about $1,100 compared to $660 for guests at traditional accommodations — but with a house of their own in which to cook and relax, they also spend less on meals, shopping and transportation — $760 to $1,100 — according to that survey.
In 2017, Airbnb held 40 percent of the short-term renter business in the region, Mckenna said. By the end of last year, that had grown to 50 percent and appears poised to keep climbing.
So far, that growth is also reflected in Essex County’s room occupancy tax, which grew to more than $2.8 million last year, up more than 40 percent since 2014, according to a report this month by County Treasurer Michael Diskin. The tax is paid on both room and short-term rentals.
Mckenna said that so far, the growth of online rentals has not seemed to hurt traditional lodging in the county, with overall traditional hospitality revenues based on occupancy and rates growing at a healthy 3.4 percent last year.
In 2014, officials in the village of Lake George, another popular Adirondack tourist destination, tackled the issue of shortterm Internet rentals by banning house rentals of less than six months in residentially zoned areas, said village Mayor Bob Blais.
At that time, there were only 16 known short-term rentals in the village “and we were already starting to get complaints,” said Blais. One notorious case involved a college fraternity that rented a home for a weekend party and then arranged to have a portable toilet placed on the front lawn to the horror of the neighborhood.
When the village was enacting the six-month lease requirement, which covered about 85 percent of the village, there were some complaints from property owners, but none ever pursued legal action, Blais said.
“Some of them complained to us that they had taxes and utilities to pay, but we responded that they knew there would be those bills when they purchased the property,” he said. “The new law solved our problem immediately and we have not had these problems since.”