DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – The City of Dallas will propose a solution to the long-simmering battle over vacation rentals on Wednesday.
They are a source of income for some homeowners, but many neighbors want them out of residential areas.
“There is noise or there are code violations such as littering or littering or even worse, gunfire,” said Tom Forsyth, a homeowner with the Dallas Neighborhood Coalition, which has received complaints against the parties and traffic that short-term rentals can attract.
The majority of rentals are run by professional hosts, according to a report by monitoring group Inside Air B&B, which found that more than two-thirds of those in Dallas have owners with multiple listings and nearly half have owners with at least one listing. least five announcements.
“When you have 6,000 STR…that’s a lot of housing that’s taken away from ordinary families who want to live here,” Forsyth said.
At a City Council briefing, City of Dallas staff plan to propose allowing day homes to be rented in residential areas if, and only if, they are a homeowner’s primary residence and there is a property exemption to reflect this.
This is the approach several other North Texas cities, including Addison, Colleyville and Coppell, have taken. Fort Worth and Grapevine banned all vacation rentals in residential areas, while Southlake banned them citywide, and Arlington limited them to residential areas within one mile of its entertainment district.
“It’s great in theory,” council member Paul Ridley said, to distinguish between rentals that are owner-occupied and those that aren’t. He believes, however, that the proposal would be nearly impossible to enforce because of the ease with which homestead exemptions can be obtained.
There is no statewide database to track these exemptions and, he says, he has heard anecdotally that people can illegally obtain exemptions for multiple homes.
“It’s a huge loophole that investors are going to drive through in a truck, pretend they’re all owner-occupied and therefore licensed,” Ridley said.
He would like to see zoning rules that completely ban short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods and treat them like hotels. Forsyth hopes the other board members agree.
“We hope the city council will have some tough questions tomorrow,” he said.
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