Airbnb hypocrisy claims rile up Hudson residents
When Rebecca Wolff listed her Hudson home on Airbnb, the news spread fast.
The former Common Council member had vehemently fought against allowing short-term rentals, or STRS, by part-time Hudson residents — only to then list her own home on Airbnb, a move that stunned the local community.
“Just months after she gets the law passed, she rents out her own home as a(n) STR, having succeeded in eliminating much of her competition on the STR market,” resident John Darby wrote in a Jan. 14 email to the Hudson Common Council. “She benefits financially from her own law.”
The STR debate, particularly in communities hit hard by gentrification, has prompted many towns and villages all over the Hudson Valley to consider laws to slow the onslaught of vacation rentals in an effort to retain housing for people who live in the region. And so it goes in Hudson.
Wolff, a poet and fiction writer, was a newcomer to politics in 2020 when she was elected to the Common Council for two years. Though she worked on many issues, she admits she ran for office to get STR
regulations done.
“It wasn’t just, ‘I want to pass this law.’ It was a long trajectory to me becoming aware of housing and racial justice as a deep issue in Hudson, which is deeply connected to housing,” Wolff said in an interview with Times Union: Hudson Valley.
The current local law permits STRS for a maximum of 60 days a year, and only if the homeowner lives in Hudson at least 50 days of the year. Wolff and Alderman John Rosenthal were driving forces behind Hudson’s STR law.
Wolff “was demonizing anybody who would have a short-term rental. She painted them all with the same brush. People warehousing properties were in the same boat as people who could only afford their mortgage by renting out from time to time,” said Monica Byrne, who owns the café Home/made Hudson on Warren Street and falls in the latter category. “I was one of the people strongly advocating for some reasonable accommodation.”
Wolff has been living in Hudson since 2005, including next to an Airbnb at one point. “It removes the whole quality, the fabric of what our domestic lives are supposed to be like — where you know the people around you to some extent, you can rely on them for something,” she said of homes that double as vacation rentals. This includes even knowing who you live next to day to day.
Decision to list
After Wolff ’s term as a public official ended, her plan was to write a book — but she needed to find a way to finance it. Wolff, who once claimed she had never rented her Hudson home as a vacation rental because it was “corrosive to a community,” in January listed her Union Street home on Airbnb for $200 a night, with a two-night minimum.
For the community, this about-face was too much. People flocked to the town’s Facebook page and Gossips of Rivertown, a Hudson community blog, where a Jan. 13 post on Wolff ’s rental got more than 3,400 hits in a few days. (The population of Hudson is 6,235.)
The comments were swift: Neighbors weighed in on the finer points of STR legality, questioned what they saw as Wolff ’s moral relativism, and remembered her vigilance on the issue. Read as a whole, the reactions are a collective jaw-drop. “I was absolutely stunned,” Byrne said.
Wolff claims not to be much of a social media user, but said that friends reached out directly to ask if she was all right.
Her mother updated her on what people were posting.
She wrote a defense of her actions in Fence Magazine, her own publication, in which she explained why she rented her space: “Until I found a subletter — now accomplished — I decided to list it on Airbnb. … My decision to rent it at the exorbitant prices you may have seen is a decision I made based on my sense that overall my effect on the City has been beneficial for residents, and that I feel okay about what I have done based on the efforts I have made and the changes I have made possible, and that I could use that money to make it possible for myself to spend time writing.”
She was struck by how strongly the community felt about STRS. “Whichever side you’re on about it, it feels very emotional to people. That is about privilege, essentially,” she told the Times Union.
While Wolff isn’t part of the most recent wave of new homeowners in Hudson, Byrne said the writer is “also a gentrifier. She’s a white woman who bought a house in Hudson at a low rate that could have been available to someone else who is low-income at the time. She is part of the gentrifying class. She doesn’t own it.”
Wolff chalks up the community backlash to personality. “I can be super-judgy — that’s why people enjoyed (the controversy) so much,” she said. “I wasn’t going against anything I ever said; I never said nobody should ever be able to Airbnb.”
The optics
Oddly, there was no urgent need for Wolff to Airbnb. She was going to get a housemate, but then realized she could move to her parents’ second home — for free — and sublet her whole house. But finding a subletter was slow, she got antsy about money, and so she listed.
Wolff said she only had two guests before renting to the subletter who’s currently in the home: “If I had relaxed and waited, it might have worked out.”
Installed at her parents’ home and writing, Wolff is also reflecting. She still believes vacation rentals are a “creepy decision to make if you have the capacity to offer a long-term rental when there is a dire housing crisis.” And she’s well aware not everyone can decamp to their parents’ second home.
Several months after the fact, it’s not clear if Wolff regrets trying her hand as an Airbnb host. On the one hand, the public flap caused her a “tremendous amount of grief,” she said. Wolff said she was fired from an affordable housing project due to the bad optics.
But Wolff is unapologetic — what she did was perfectly legal, she stressed. Also, technically, she didn’t displace a family. “I am only displacing myself, not a family that could be living in this place. That to me is really the aspect (of the public furor) that is reprehensible,” she said.
But she acknowledged one mistake: “My son pointed out to me the other day: ‘Mom, you were a public figure. You had people who depended on you to uphold these principles.’ I didn’t think about it from that angle,” she said.
That’s apparent to Byrne, as well. She’s just grateful for Hudson’s reasonable STR regulations, which help her and her wife to pay the bills. Being able to occasionally rent out their home on weekends kept them afloat during the pandemic, Byrne said, when they couldn’t operate their restaurant safely.
“There were times we slept on couches, but we got through COVID,” she said. “While moving out of my house every Friday has not been fun and has not been my dream, we were fortunate. It saved us.”