Lessons for LA from Airbnb in San Francisco and New York

AIRBNB ASSAULT-The “listening sessions” are over, the holidays loom ahead, and the machinery of the LA City Council is doing what it does best -- quiet wheeling and dealing to come up with a “mother knows best” draft ordinance for short term rentals, which will probably appear with a truncated time frame to do anything about it. Happy holidays.

As the machinery of LA City goes off in secret to determine what is good for us, it provides a moment to see how other large metropolitan cities are faring with the “New World” of Airbnb and its brethren. 

San Francisco, birthplace of Airbnb only a few years ago, seems to have a growing disenchantment with its signature short term rental company. Slated for a November 3 vote, Proposition F would impose significant restrictions and regulations on the high flying entity. 

Airbnb’s response has been predictable. In a previous CityWatch article, I talked about how they hired Chris Lehane as the head of “Global Policy and Public Affairs,” and is a very politically connected Democratic lobbyist type renown for hardball attack dog politics. 

Guess who’s running the No on F campaign for Airbnb? Yep. And he’s armed with an $8.5 million dollar war chest funded by Airbnb to take out the opposition. They reported a grand total of a $350,000 in funding. So far, Mr. Lehane has managed to gross out even jaded Bay area residents with a series of ads placed on Muni bus shelters. My personal favorite is the one captioned: 

“Dear Public Library System, 

We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later. 

Love, 

Airbnb”                                              

This series of ads generated enough heat that Airbnb had to publicly apologize and take the ads down. Nonetheless, the campaign moves forward, including the usual bought and paid for political endorsements. 

Let’s take a look at why Airbnb is so freaked out -- the terms of Proposition F itself. Its major provisions are: 

• Short-term rentals are limited to 75 days per year (hosted or not.)
• Owners must provide proof of authorization and make quarterly reports.
• Anyone living within 100 feet of a short-term rental unit becomes an “interested party” with a right to sue any hosts or hosting platforms violating the law.
• In-law units cannot be used for short-term-rentals. 

So there you have the issues that makes Airbnb willing to spend close to $9 million bucks to defeat it.  Maybe there are some lessons to be learned for us here in Los Angeles -- whatever the fate of Prop F in San Francisco next week.  

For example, the LA City Council is not the final arbiter of short term rentals in Los Angeles in the face of an initiative. Maybe citizens should remind the Council of this fact if and when they come up with their usual type of program offering immunity for the industry in exchange for some tax money. 

Less close to home, but equally interesting, is a recent New York State Attorney General report about Airbnb in New York City, a study for the period of 2010-2014. 

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Here are the key findings of the report: 

• Short-term rentals experienced explosive growth.
• Most short-term rentals booked in New York violated the law.
• Commercial users accounted for a disproportionate share of private short-term-rentals by volume and revenue.
• Top commercial users employed rental platforms to run multimillion-dollar-short-term rental businesses.
• Private short-term-rentals displaced long-term housing in thousands of apartments.
• Numerous short-term-rental units appeared to serve as illegal hostels.
• Gentrified or rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods primarily in Manhattan accounted for the vast majority of revenue from short-term-rentals in New York City. 

Substitute Los Angeles for New York City and I think the key points match up well with our situation. They are consistent with the evidence and testimony given before various LA City entities. Just ask the folks in Venice about the privatization of affordable housing or look at the plight of upscale Brentwood as their community is decimated by so called short-term rentals. So far, the silence from City Hall is deafening. 

One major difference between San Francisco or NYC and the City of LA is that we have no real prosecutorial arm. As a result, the city and its agencies utterly fail to uphold the current laws and zoning regulations, allowing the Airbnb types to do as they please without meaningful enforcement. 

While I’m sure that Mike Feuer would disagree, the LA City Attorney is essentially the attorney for the elected officials, not us. His job seems to be to defend their actions, not to help the citizens. Witness the subcontracting of legal work relating to development challenges by the public to the developers’ own attorneys. I think this reality makes San Francisco’s idea of empowering neighbors with the right to sue very interesting indeed. 

More later. For now, I want to encourage some thought and dialogue before City officials produce a draft ordinance -- which they will then be honor-bound to defend. Who knows, maybe somebody might actually listen!

 

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

-cw

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 88

Pub: Oct 30, 2015