West Marin’s divisions over vacation rentals are coming into sharp relief as the county looks to regulate the industry. Many year-round locals, especially renters, view short-term stays through companies like Airbnb as taking vital housing off the market and driving up rents. Meanwhile, a contingent of homeowners resents the county’s efforts to strengthen regulations on the rentals, which many say help them afford property in pricey coastal towns.
When supervisors passed a moratorium on new West Marin vacation rentals in May, they had heard overwhelmingly from the first camp. Now, as county staff begin to hash out a set of long-term countywide regulations that seek a balance between housing affordability and coastal Marin’s history as a vacation destination, they are encountering a backlash from rental operators up in arms over the moratorium.
“I think we’re hearing more strongly than we have heard before from the perspective homeowners and of short-term rental operators,” Sarah Jones, acting director of the Marin County Community Development Agency, said at a West Marin community session last week that was dominated by incensed Dillon Beach rental operators.
A Zoom commenter with the screen name Rachel said West Marin’s economy was “100 percent” based on travel and tourism and later said the notion that Airbnbs take potentially affordable housing off the market was “false.” San Francisco resident Jacqueline Hilger-Rolfe said she was in the middle of an expensive home build when the moratorium passed and had been hoping to rent the place out. “You need to grandfather in the people that are building homes right now,” she wrote in the chat.
The county first began to regulate short-term rentals like Airbnbs in 2018, requiring owners to obtain a business license for their rental and a certificate making the rentals taxable as accommodations. The same year, voters bumped up the transient occupancy tax in West Marin from 10 to 14 percent, with the proceeds going toward community housing and fire departments. The 2018 ordinance also established “good neighbor” rules requiring rental operators to provide neighbors with contact information and to print handouts on garbage and noise policies for guests.
Yet housing advocates continued to point to the proliferation of Airbnbs, including some owned by corporations, as a driver of high rents, hollowing out close-knit coastal communities. More than 70 percent of the unincorporated county’s short-term rentals are in West Marin, though the area is home to less than a quarter of the county’s residential units. County records, which likely underestimate the true numbers, show that short-term rentals make up 31 percent of Dillon Beach parcels, 27 percent of Stinson Beach parcels and 25 percent of Marshall parcels. Bolinas, Inverness, Tomales and Point Reyes Station are less vacation-oriented, though the numbers there have increased. About 10 percent of parcels in each village are permitted for short-term rentals. In the San Geronimo Valley, rates are lower.
Earlier this year, Marin followed the lead of Sonoma County, freezing new short-term rental licenses to keep the situation stable while it explores permanent options. The moratorium within the Measure W tax area is set to expire in May 2024, but a new set of regulations for all unincorporated Marin could supersede it sooner. County planner Kathleen Kilgariff said her department hopes to bring a new draft ordinance to the Board of Supervisors next spring. The California Coastal Commission, charged with keeping the coast accessible to visitors, will also need to sign off on an ordinance.
Marin could follow Sonoma, which barred vacation rentals from certain housing-starved communities, or it could take inspiration from its own municipalities. Belvedere, Tiburon, Sausalito, Larkspur and Corte Madera prohibit short-term rentals altogether. Fairfax passed a set of regulations in June requiring registration fees and annual inspections. In Novato, only individuals, not corporations or businesses, can operate a short-term rental, and the operator must live in the home at least two months a year.
Whichever path they choose, county staff said it will be important to draw distinctions between a business renting out dozens of properties year-round and an individual who rents out a room or cottage for the summer to make ends meet. “The end of the spectrum, a pure commercial operation is something we want to discourage,” Ms. Jones said.
But the aversion of some of West Marin’s short-term rental operators toward the prospect of any new regulation was evident at Monday’s meeting. Scott Grooms, who rents out property in Stinson Beach, held forth about the interests of realtors and buyers who might be interested in investing in vacation rental properties, comparing regulation to “blunt force trauma” against them. “Our government at all levels should bend over backwards to first protect homeowners’ economic wellbeing and not cause negative economic impacts on its taxpayers,” he added.
The county’s data became another point of contention. County staff use business licenses and tax certificates to count the rentals, but because some rentals are unpermitted, industry sites like AirDNA, which aggregates data from companies like Airbnb and VRBO, show higher numbers. The county also must rely on AirDNA for information pulled directly from the accommodation websites, like median monthly revenue and occupancy rates, which are not publicly documented.
That data shows short-term Dillon Beach rentals, all of which are entire homes, charge an average daily rate of $642 and have an occupancy rate of about 84 percent for the past year. Their median monthly revenue amounts to $12,500. In Marshall, where two thirds of rentals are entire homes and the occupancy rate is just under that of Dillon Beach, operators charge an average of $471 per night and take in a median of $10,000 per month, AirDNA shows. In Stinson Beach, rentals cost an average of $524 per night, taking in a monthly median of $8,096 with an 87 percent occupancy rate. The median Point Reyes Station rental takes in $7,634 per month, while the median Inverness rental sees $7,625. In Bolinas, the median revenue is $7,592 every month.
But some operators contested the AirDNA data. “You’re absolutely using false information,” said John Arguelles, a Dillon Beach rental operator, arguing that few houses in the beach community are occupied by vacationers more than 80 percent of the year. Ms. Jones acknowledged the site’s data could be off, but said it was a useful glimpse at the sky-high rates that incentivize property owners to turn to vacation rentals rather than provide long-term housing.
A few attendees pushed back on what they saw as a takeover by quibbling rental operators. Bolinas resident David Kimball pled for the other participants to set aside their questions about minutiae and allow Ms. Jones and Ms. Kilgariff to continue their presentation. “We’re turning over grains of sand,” he said.
Maureen Cornelia, a longtime board member at the Community Land Trust Association of West Marin, spoke on behalf of renters increasingly displaced from the coastal villages where they work. “Everything that I’ve been listening to tonight has come from the perspective of fortunate property owners,” she said. “It just really worries me that the voice of the renters in our community who are struggling to stay and serve has been completely absent in this discussion tonight.”
As Marin finalizes housing strategies in the countywide plan, locals opposed to the development of new homes have pointed to short-term rentals as a major culprit for housing scarcity. Now, Ms. Jones said, “we’re hearing from people saying: ‘You’re not going to solve affordable housing with short-term rentals, you need to build more housing.’ The answer is, we need to do both.”
Ms. Jones acknowledged the potential shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all regulatory approach to the unincorporated county. An agricultural town like Point Reyes Station, for example, doesn’t have the capacity or history of accommodating visitors that have long defined vacation getaways like Dillon Beach. Ms. Jones stressed that the ongoing series of community workshops was just the beginning of the process. “We have a ton of work to do,” she said.