City hits pause on host-occupied rentals

More than two years after he first raised the possibility of revising the city’s short-term rental regulations to better accommodate owners renting rooms to visitors, City Commissioner Hagen Brody is still waiting for officials to discuss the idea in earnest.

He thought the day would come Oct. 19. The agenda for that day’s commission meeting included a report from City Attorney Robert Fournier on “hosted rentals” — defined in a memo as situations in which a homeowner is renting a room or accessory dwelling at their primary residence.

But before the discussion could begin, Mayor Jen Ahearn-Koch asked the rest of the board to hold off on the item until a future meeting.

The rest of the commission agreed, putting it off and declining to set a date for the discussion to be rescheduled. Ahearn-Koch said she wanted to postpone the discussion because she believed the public hadn’t had adequate time to review the item, listed on the agenda when it was published Oct. 8.

The commission directed Fournier to produce a report on hosted rentals in January. At that same meeting, the board also asked Fournier to produce a report on large vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods, an item the commission discussed and gave direction on at its Sept. 21 meeting.

Ahearn-Koch said she believed groups including the Coalition of City Neighborhood Associations and the North Trail Redevelopment Partnership needed additional time to consider Fournier’s report on hosted rentals.

“Because of COVID-19, because of the meetings that have not been able to take place, it’s giving those who are going to be the most impacted by this the opportunity to read the memo,” Ahearn-Koch said.

In the report, Fournier said the city has the legal authority to allow stays of less than one week in hosted rentals in residential areas without affecting the city’s existing vacation rental regulations. Currently, the city prohibits all rentals of less than a week. Brody, a proponent of the change, has said hosted rentals don’t pose the same problems as other vacation rental properties because the homeowner is on the site and has a vested interest in the character of their neighborhood.

Although Ahearn-Koch said neighborhood associations needed more time to review the item, the commission did receive input from Lou Costa, the president of the Coalition of City Neighborhood Associations. Costa said that the CCNA board of directors was concerned about the prospect of changing rental regulations and recommended the city take no action.

The city’s vacation rental ordinance predates a 2011 state law prohibiting such regulations, and revisions could cause the city to lose its grandfathered status. Despite Fournier’s opinion that hosted rental regulations could be implemented separately from the city’s vacation rental ordinance, CCNA’s board of directors did not take that as a guarantee.

“The home-sharing law has little upside and a huge downside,” Costa said.

Commissioner Willie Shaw shared that opinion.

“To Mr. Costa’s point, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Shaw said.

Other commissioners said they thought it made sense to delay any discussion about next steps until the board could have a more comprehensive conversation with more members of the community engaged.

But Brody expressed frustration about the delay, suggesting that commissioners were intentionally stymieing a policy they were uninterested in pursuing, a charge that drew pushback from the rest of the board.

Brody’s proposal to reschedule the discussion to Dec. 7 failed, as Shelli Freeland Eddie was the only other commissioner to support setting a specific date for revisiting the item.

Commissioner Liz Alpert said people who operate host-occupied rentals in violation of city regulations will likely continue to do so without issue unless other problems arise at their property.

“I don’t see how we’re harming anyone by continuing this item,” Alpert said.

Although Brody said he understood the desire to get more input from the public, when the commission does revisit the item, he cautioned against using neighborhood and business association input as perfectly representative of the community’s outlook.

“There will be opponents to this, no doubt, but there are also proponents of it,” Brody said. “A lot of the people who could benefit from this are not necessarily people plugged into their neighborhood association.”