Property owners must play by rules

Boston has a sizable housing crisis, and while a magicwand solution is always welcome, every bit helps in the bid to get more apartments on the rental market. What doesn’t help: nonresident property owners renting out rooms or homes on shortterm rental apps like Airbnb.

And as the Herald’s Sean Philip Cotter and Erin Tiernan reported last month, new city regulations that took effect in January bar these owners from renting those rooms or homes on short-term rental apps.

Now if only everyone would play by the rules.

Boston’s Housing Chief Sheila Dillon told the Herald she estimates 3,000 units in Boston could return to the long-term market this month. By Dec. 1, people who aren’t registered with the city won’t be able to list their units on the short-term rental site.

Boston attorneys are now dealing with businesses that own and are still renting out dozens of apartments in the city as short-term rentals — snubbing the new regulations.

Inspectional Services Commissioner Dion Irish told city councilors during a hearing Thursday that city lawyers continue to meet with “large operators” with “quite a number of units” that are flouting the new short-term rental ordinance.

Yes, there’s money to be made — lots of it — from renting those units as de facto short-stay hotel rooms. But every apartment on the short term rental market is one off the regular apartment market — and Boston needs as many of those as it can get.

Experts are split on whether more rental units will have an effect on rents themselves.

Larry Rideout, who runs Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty, told the Herald that the newly available units will add to the supply, which may help keep prices from rising. But Kathy Brown of the Boston Tenants Association said she doubts they’ll be affordable to the city’s low- and middle-income earners.

Tackling high rents is a battle for another day — right now the target is to cut down on the conversion of apartments into hotel rooms.

The city is to be commended for going full bore on this — from passing the regulations returning apartments to the regular market, to going after these rental scofflaws.

Irish said some type of legal action could be used “if we feel like some people are just paying their way out of this” and simply eating the fines the city has been slamming them with.

“That’s when the nuclear weapons come out,” Irish told the Herald after the hearing, declining to elaborate on what the city might try.

It sounds a little dramatic — but at the end of the day, it should put any “these rules don’t apply to me” types on notice. It’s good to know, in these days of “money talks,” that the city is not willing to turn a blind eye to flagrant flouting of the rules.

Short-term rentals mixed in with regular apartments do more than just take units off the market and out of the reach of Bostonians looking for a place to live, they erode the sense of community and neighborhood that comes from people putting down roots — even rented ones.

Good job, Boston. Go get ’em.