Voters in San Francisco will have their say on Proposition F, a ballot issue that would attempt to clamp down on short-term vacation rentals. The public debate over the measure, which is widely known as the “Airbnb Initiative,” mirrors the debates here in Honolulu over transient vacation rentals. Despite the focus on Airbnb, the new restrictions would also hit property owners who rent through VRBO, HomeAaway, and other services.
If approved, the initiative would not established a ban on short-term rentals, but would put a cap of 75 rental days per year for residential properties, and add reporting requirements.
The Los Angeles Times has a good story today reviewing the pros and cons of the initiative (“San Francisco residents to vote on contentious Prop. F targeting Airbnb“).
The argument in favor of Proposition F is grounded in the belief that short-term rentals hurt the city’s already limited housing supply. Rents in San Francisco have already skyrocketed, with the median price of a one-bedroom apartment tipping into $4,000 a month. If homeowners can make more money renting out their units weeks at a time, why bother with long-term tenants?
Opponents say the reporting requirements would be too intrusive, and the 75-day limit would do nothing to address the housing crisis.
Airbnb has reportedly pumped more than $8 million into the campaign against Proposition F, and deployed a high-powered political strategist.
For those of us far from the battleground, the LA Times also provided a concise summary of the issues (“Everything you need to know about San Francisco’s Airbnb ballot measure“).
Whatever the outcome, political lessons learned in this campaign will undoubtedly inform the ongoing political fights over vacation rentals here and across the country.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
message to people:
yer not welcome unless you obey. no trespassing. no change. we like it the way it is. everything is in such wonderful condition without the outside world. and no criticize either. it’s our cave and it will stay that way. dern outsiders.
good post. I found this article on the Prop F vote to be incredibly instructive: http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/prop-f/
Prop F was soundly defeated at the polls. But SF ain’t Hawai’i. One surefire way for Airbnb to alienate voters here would be to engage in the same kind of aggressive advertising that they used in the Bay Area. Or….they can just ignore that advice and flush ad dollars down the toilet like Monsanto did.
If Hawaii thinks its housing policy is better than SF’s, then we are delusional. The stuff Admin. is coming with that they think are so innovative is like kindergarten crayon drawings compared to what SF has been through in their discourse on the issue.
And they have done this a lot longer, more diligently, and on a bigger scale than us. SF has done and forgotten more about homelessness and housing than we will ever dream of knowing. We need to stop always trying to kid ourselves about this stuff – but then that also does serve a purpose.
And yet SF still has a terrible and seemingly intractable homelessness problem despite throwing untold millions at it for decades.
SF is nothing but a model for creating a permanent homeless industrial complex and druggie disaster area that’s rife with political favoritism, profiteering, and misery fed by naive paternalistic “progressive” posturing and coercive ideological masochism.
Now it has a super-distorted housing market as well. Good luck with that shit.
And yet, Honolulu is trying the same things SF long saw as failures, except Hawaii thinks it’s got great new plans to stop homelessness that no one tried before.
Somebody here is much too easily impressed by SF’s “ingenuity” in dealing with the homeless problem. In totaling up the number of homeless they supposedly got off the street last year, they include some 8000 who were simply give a one way ticket out of town (i.e. dumping their problem on somebody else.)
http://sfist.com/2014/06/27/8000_of_the_19000_homeless_off_sf_s.php
People are confused. The point is not that SF is so great on homelessness. It’s that SF has already tried and rejected magnitudes more and failed, yet Hawaii thinks we in our singular brilliance may have just found all the solutions no one else has cuz we are special!
Instead of clamping down short term vacation rentals, why not regulate some of its terms like prices and the maximum stay per house? They need to balance things out because home vacation rentals are also contributing on the industry.