Vacation Rental Hammer Set to Drop January 1

Come January 1, short-term vacation rentals will be vulnerable to an indiscriminate crackdown, City Attorney Ariel Calonne told councilmembers on 10/11. “There will be no enforcement priorities; we will pursue each and every violation.” The New Year deadline caps the city’s enforcement phase-in, which for the past year focused on units with the most neighborhood complaints and hosts who haven’t paid taxes on their cash flow. The enforcement exception is any permitted rental in an R-4 or commercial zone. As it turns out, those are very few and far between. And increasingly, owners of such properly zoned rentals are realizing that the city’s permitting process, by design, is very expensive and slow, a reflection of long-held growth-management measures.