It hasn’t quite been a year since Javier Garcia started offering his Oleander home for rent on the Airbnb short-term rental platform, and despite the lack of city regulations authorizing such activities, he said: “Until ‘Now everything is fine’.
The business makes a bit more money than it would otherwise make by renting the place out long-term, he said. Neighbors sometimes complain about the disturbances, which taught him to stay alert, but Garcia said he didn’t hear anything from the city.
As far as any concerns his location undermines local hotels and motels, he said, “Competition is always a good thing.”
It’s a trickier statement than it sounds at a time when the Bakersfield city government is weighing landlords’ private property rights against neighborhood compatibility and environmental concerns.
Last year, the city attempted to craft local regulations for Airbnb and other short-term rental arrangements known as STRs. The proposal would have addressed nuisances, brought in new tax revenue and created a new level of government bureaucracy to regulate these activities.
But the fact that the proposal goes nowhere shows how STRs present a thorny set of regulatory challenges.
BUSY MARKET
As of Friday afternoon, about 300 STRs were listed online as available for rent this weekend in the Bakersfield area, at prices ranging from $39 to over $200. Some were studios, bed and breakfasts, and some were houses with backyard pools. Airbnb’s website said more than 16,000 customers have used its platform to book stays in the city.
Ward 2 Councilman Andrae Gonzales said he’s met with people for and against STRs, and he thinks it’s time Bakersfield established vacation rental rules that would address potential issues. in advance.
“Proactively enforcing every vacation rental would be a futile effort,” he said by email. “I think the city should regulate them, charge TOT (transient occupancy tax) like hotels and motels, and handle noise or other nuisance complaints like it would any other property.”
Skeptics include Ward 5 Councilman Bruce Freeman, who said STRs can disrupt neighborhoods and discourage hotel development. He said fines await owners whose vacation rentals draw repeated complaints of excessive noise and other code violations.
DOWNTOWN DILEMMA
The lack of consistent STR regulation in the city has recently slowed, if not stopped, a larger residential development proposed by the owner of The Bakersfield Californian’s historic former home, Harrell Holdings.
The company applied for, and was denied, a permit to convert an annex building it owns in the city center into a single rental unit that can accommodate up to three people for up to 13 days at a time.
Explaining its decision, the city said hotels and motels seemed better suited to short-term housing and it welcomed development efforts that shared its vision for downtown.
Harrell Vice President Gizel Bermudez defended the company’s proposal, saying it would help tourism and business travel while providing an attractive option to nearby low-quality motels.
She offered to collect STR fees that would be set aside for security, cleaning, beautification and crime reduction. The company also said it wanted to resolve this hurdle before moving forward with a larger project to convert the nearby former newspaper building into long-term residential units.
NO RULES
A statement issued Wednesday by the city noted that its municipal code is silent on the issue of STRs. (A story on Monday’s Californian coverage of Harrell’s proposal should have said that Bakersfield doesn’t allow short-term rentals, but neither does it ban them.)
In the spring of last year, city staff took a hard look at the matter, after receiving a recommendation from Gonzales about the possibility of proposing a new vacation rental ordinance.
Staff returned with a report that STRs have often been banned in residential areas intended for longer-term housing and that elsewhere the issues range from noise, litter and parking impacts to more timely concerns about rentals that pull residential units out of what is now a tight long-term housing market.
SURVEY RESULTS
The city surveyed eight municipalities in the state that regulated STRs and found that most imposed a permit, application fee, parking restrictions, and noise regulations. All required TOT tax certification. As potential penalties, he referenced administrative citations, nuisance abatement procedures and a “three strikes” system in which a trio of verified violations results in action against the owner’s license.
Implementing everything would require considerable staff effort and three separate contracts with external vendors, according to the report.
The city said by email that work on an STR ordinance was pending. During that time, code enforcement staff can send corrective notices to offending STR owners or ask the city attorney’s office to send a violation letter, he said.
Besides individual neighbors, the hospitality industry is perhaps the strongest critic of STRs.
HOTEL COMPLAINTS
Hotels are heavily regulated and must pay local TOT taxes, but that’s not necessarily the case with STRs, said AJ Rossitto, legislation and communications coordinator for the California Hotel and Lodging Association. He said different municipalities have taken different approaches to regulating platforms like Airbnb, he said, and some are finding that STR owners are not following zoning or tax regulations.
“It sets the stage for an imbalance,” he said. “Generally speaking, we just want a level playing field.”
Bakersfield’s Home2 Suites by Hilton sales manager Denise Taylor-Connor said STRs affect her business, but perhaps not as much as they affect hotels with shorter stays. She sees Airbnb-style rentals as having an advantage over hotels in terms of cost, but not sanitation.
“You don’t know how well the owner cleaned it,” she said.
Bakersfield Association of Realtors president Scott Knoeb launched a vigorous defense of STRs. He said by email that the group would oppose regulations on short-term rentals in a bid to guard against any infringement of landlords’ right to rent their property.
RENTAL RIGHTS
A ban on STRs would be a violation, he claimed, treating an inherent right as a privilege. Mandatory inspections such as those in place elsewhere, he said, violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. And zoning-based restrictions wrongly overlook their continued residential use, he added.
Instead of removing long-term housing when there is a shortage, Knoeb explained, STRs supplement it.
“We desperately need more housing,” he said, “and less government interference in the options available.”
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