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View Winners → Arcadia Seeks to Prohibit Airbnb, Short-Term Rentals
Arcadia Weekly May 04, 2017
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Multiple cities like Airbnb’s hometown, San Francisco, seek to regulate short-term rentals. – Courtesy photo
Convenient and homely; short-term rental sites are resistant to regulation and willing to put up a fight
By Daniel Garay
The Arcadia City Council study session for short-term rentals, like Airbnb, ended with a motion by the Council to direct staff to make an ordinance looking to “prohibit short-term rentals in residential zones within the city.”
Organizations like Airbnb and VRBO, part of Home Away, provide listings of home owners and landlords who seek to exchange short-term lodging for money in a room or an entire dwelling.
Recently, the listings on Airbnb for Arcadia show an average price per night of $129 for the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. The attractions to these rentals are the closeness to Los Angeles and Pasadena, as well as shopping at the Santa Anita Westfield mall.
Most of these listings are located on the Southwestern region of Arcadia, east of Santa Anita Ave., south of El Camino and north of Longden. The lodgings offered are mostly rooms.
VRBO, however, rents full houses; the few of which lie outside of Arcadia, currently, go for a $300 nightly rate.
About half of the current listings are written in Chinese for travelers who visit relatives and need homelike accommodations close by. This is what makes Airbnb and VRBO attractive alternatives to expensive hotel rates.
The average hotel rate for a hotel in Arcadia is $134 for Memorial Day weekend. It is plain to see that the cost and comforts of a home work out in short-term renters’ favor. One does not need to be a hotel worker to provide lodging and comfort to a traveling party, and the online based ease of booking and connection to the renter makes the service much more friendly and personal.
Regulations for Airbnb have lit up the news. The most famous news story has been the lack of transparency and ability for users to defraud patrons. The hosts can make profiles and listings of their homes without much interference or confirmation from the site. There are rules and regulations for listings, but some people have found ways around the system.
According to consumer group Which?, embedding the email in a photo of the property or explicitly asking for offsite contact for payment are often avenues fraudsters take to play the system. Some profiles can have more than one listing; one consumer group found had 63 properties, of which 62 were fake.
As a result, cities like Airbnb’s hometown, San Francisco, took legal action, seeking to verify renters and subject them to existing city law. May 1 was the day the two parties settled, agreeing that registration is a must in order to rent in San Francisco.
Other cities have sought to ban these rental sites. For example, Miami sought to raise revenue on short term rentals through a six percent tax. Airbnb saw it as a deliberate attempt to hurt their industry in favor of hotels and sued in mid-April. Things got worse when a house in a gated community angered residents after it was discovered that a large house was being run as a hostel for dozens of beds at $30 a night. The owner was slapped with a $64,000 fine and was removed from Airbnb, as told by the Miami Herald.
In cities where Airbnb and other short-term rental sites have a large presence, actions to regulate and hold them accountable to existing rules and regulations create tension. And finally, from the Tennessean, a Nashville city meeting, proposing to ban short-term rentals, featured more than 100 speakers on the Airbnb question. 45 spoke in favor, while 65 spoke against it. The subject was so contentious; the item was tabled for two weeks.
