Last week I dialed in to the county’s meeting to learn more about the status of short-term rentals in West Marin, and I have to admit the dialogue was depressing. Of the 167 or so callers, it seemed as though 160 were investors who had purchased one or more homes with the explicit goal of renting them to weekend visitors for profit. Though I don’t fault anyone for seeking profit, I draw the line when it comes at the expense of our community.
Back in 2009, when Airbnb first launched its website, the service was positioned as a clever way for cash-strapped homeowners with an extra room to earn a little money on the side. Nothing wrong with that. It then grew into a way to rent out your home while out of town for the weekend, and then into a way for longstanding summer folk to help defray the cost of upkeep by renting their houses in the off-season. Perfectly reasonable.
Like many tech businesses, this clever peer-to-peer “share rental” morphed into a bona fide industry populated by serious investors who purchase multiple properties with the sole purpose of weekend rentals. If we were a large city with an excess of unused housing stock, this may be an economic boon—but to a small town with a desperate shortage of housing for its own population, it has become nothing short of a disaster.
The investor group has been chanting that they are not the cause of our housing shortage and that in fact they are the engine of our local economy. In a recent edition of the Light, one investor-homeowner claimed that without her $1,700-per-night Airbnb, our grocery store would close down. This shows just how unknowledgeable she is about this community. Airbnb renters keep the Palace Market open? Please….
This week, my wife and I scanned the usual websites for available long-term rentals in coastal Marin and found only three available. For perspective, there are more than 600 short-term rentals licensed in West Marin. It’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that Airbnb has not robbed us of critical housing. We have housing—it’s just not being used for people to live in.
For the record, my wife and I live in a long-term rental in Point Reyes, which certainly makes us more sympathetic to people who struggle to cling onto housing out here. We have many good friends who have been forced to leave town because they were evicted from their homes and could not find housing. Dave Leslie, his wife, Zoe, who ran a preschool, and their two kids lost their home and moved to Massachusetts last summer. Both Dave and Zoe grew up here. Ethan Livingston and his wife, Terra, both born and raised in the watershed, and their three kids lost their home and moved to Utah after an unsuccessful search for a long-term rental. These families all earn good wages—it’s not that they couldn’t afford housing—it simply wasn’t available. There are so many more examples, but I put some names to this to allow the impact to sink in.
What’s puzzling to me is that this chorus of investors is demanding that the moratorium on new short-term rental licenses be lifted. To be clear, these people are devastated that the county has temporarily decided to pause issuing new licenses. Are they saying we actually need more than 600 Airbnb units? I guess they are positioned to purchase more housing for weekend listings.
In my judgment, we need to not only extend the moratorium on new licenses, but also work to reduce the number of licenses—particularly those that have been issued to the investor class: corporations, multiple-homeowners and possibly even non-residents. Mind you, I am not saying we should remove all Airbnb rentals from West Marin, simply those that are solely used for investment purposes.
I was interested in learning that many towns in California have banned short-term rentals completely—Belvedere, Carmel, Danville, Del Mar, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, Larkspur, Manhattan Beach, Ojai, Rancho Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach, San Juan Capistrano, Sausalito and Tiburon. Most of these are small coastal towns that have decided it’s not worth sacrificing their community for outside profit-seeking. The question is what has taken us so long to wake up to this problem, and is it too late?
Let’s consider what kind of towns we want to have 10 or 20 years from now. Already the school is challenged with low enrollment and local businesses struggle during the weekdays when business is slow. West Marin has always had properly licensed hotels and inns for visitors; why do we need to rezone our residential neighborhoods for commercial use? It’s time to rethink this trend, stop it in its tracks and reverse some of the damage it has caused to our community. Please let Supervisor Dennis Rodoni know that you are concerned about the impact of short-term rentals on our beloved small towns.
Andrew Zlot raises water buffalo on the Double 8 Dairy and lives in Point Reyes Station.