By Khalida Sarwari
Comings and goings at all hours of the night, honking car horns, loud music and bright headlights shining into windows: This is the atmosphere created by letting short-term rentals go unchecked in Saratoga, a group of unhappy residents told their elected officials earlier this month. The message to the city council was loud and clear: uphold the ordinance the city has in place and continue to ban short-term rentals.
At its meeting on April 1, the council acted accordingly by ultimately voting not to make any changes, at least for another year. Mayor Howard Miller disagreed; not taking any action or establishing a permitting process, he said, would be shortsighted.
“I think the disadvantage of staying where we are right now is that we have zero visibility,” said Miller. “I think if you put forth a program by which people had to apply for a permit … that forces everybody to come out of the woodwork, declare that they’re going to try to run one of these businesses in their neighborhoods, go through a process by which we can clearly and specifically inform all the neighbors and articulate all the constraints and then have them come back in six months or a year and if there are problems we don’t reissue the permit.”
Saratoga isn’t the only jurisdiction that’s grappling with short-term rentals and their impact on communities. Locally, the cities of San Jose and San Francisco recently adopted ordinances to allow and regulate short-term rentals with mixed results, while the cities of San Mateo and Sunnyvale are initiating their own studies of the issue.
Short-term rentals are defined as a type of new “sharing economy” where people rent out rooms or their entire homes. Popular websites such as Airbnb allow property owners to post information and pictures of the space they’re renting out. Users then simply search for an accommodation in the city of their choice and find one within their budget. The problem, particularly in cities such as Saratoga, is that these rentals are established in residential areas where the traffic and noise generated from short-term renters can impact the quality of life of long-term residents.
About a handful of residents from one particular neighborhood turned out at the April 1 meeting to voice their complaints about the activity they’ve noticed in their community and concerns about safety and impact on the cohesion of their neighborhood. The city received its first complaints about a property owner who was operating illegally last July and subsequently issued a series of enforcement letters and a formal citation.
“We have found that there has been a significant change in the feel, if you will, of the neighborhood in the last six to eight months because suddenly there is an element of transiency which we had never experienced before,” said Larry Hernandez, a 30-year resident of the impacted neighborhood. “Very strange cars coming and going, people walking around. It’s a very quiet place and it always has been. It no longer has that character.”
Another resident, Brad Paulsen, urged the council to get in front of the problem and treat it with the same priority as they do the Village.
“We need to step up and take this thing by the horns,” said Brad. “Protecting our neighborhood’s small town feel is absolutely not to be the exception; it is to be the standard. That’s why we moved here, and we’re holding you accountable to making that the standard as well.”
Other residents pleaded for the city to take a stronger stance against the commercialization of residential zones. They spoke in favor of maintaining the city ordinance banning short-term rentals in residential areas. The fine for violators, according to Erwin Ordonez, the city’s community development director, is $100 a day. Refusal or failure to pay that fine could result in the placement of a lien on the violator’s property, he said.
The council proposed studying this issue and possibly changing the ordinance in February. On April 1, however, most of the council members could not agree on whether the problem was more of an enforcement or visibility issue. They did, however, agree not to proceed with any changes for now and continue to monitor the state legislature’s impending action on a pair of bills that would regulate short-term rentals and could pre-empt regulation by local cities.
“We have regulations and an ordinance right now which are enforceable and which allow us to uphold the quality of life with regard to quietness, public safety and a quaint neighborhood,” said Councilwoman Emily Lo. “Unless we can come up with something that can uphold the quality of life, I don’t think we need to take any actions right now.”
Link: Short-term rentals a cause for concern in local neighborhoods