Stop L.A. County war on Airbnb rentals
Do most of the Airbnb and Vrbo units our friends and neighbors in Los Angeles County occasionally rent out seem to be rooms in, or the entirety of, their primary residences?
They do not. Nor do they seem to be that way all around the world, where the hotel-alternative market has really taken off. If that was the original intent of the online hospitality services, that's not the way they are working now.
Is this a problem? Well, for those in some areas, the clickety-clack of travelers' suitcases on the sidewalks and on the stairways can be an annoyance, and when you hear about party houses in the Hollywood Hills where rowdy groups gather all night long and violence has occurred, you're glad you don't live on that block.
But there are surely other remedies for Los Angeles County lawmakers to deal with these problems than essentially banning short-term rentals by owners who don't live in the residences full-time.
And yet that's what the county Board of Supervisors is proposing in a unanimous vote Tuesday that means property owners in unincorporated areas could soon be barred
How to have your say:
from renting out properties they don't live in to travelers.
The supes claim the move would put more homes on the market for actual Angelenos in what is certainly an extraordinarily expensive market with little supply.
We don't claim — we know — that such a move would be a huge hit to the pocketbooks of many locals able to afford their own mortgages because of the rental income they currently enjoy.
Truly absurdly, after understandable complaints about the coming economic hit from those who have built ADUs behind their homes and rent them out, the supervisors crafted an amendment to the ordinance “that would allow hosts to rent out a primary residence to guests while they stay in the secondary unit,” LAist reports. What on Earth is the logic to that one?
This misguided legislation would only affect the 1 million people of the county's 10 million population living in unincorporated areas rather than in the 88 cities here, many of which have their own, less strict guidelines for short-term rentals — 120 days maximum in the city of Los Angeles, for instance. That caveat does not make it any better of an idea.
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