Better Neighbors LA highlights non-compliance
By Dolores Quintana
LA Best Neighbors (BNA) released a report that shows one in five listings posted by Airbnb hosts during a twelve-month study period failed to act in accordance with City of Los Angeles ordinances that regulate rentals short term. BNA is a coalition of housing advocates, hotel workers and tenant rights groups who want to hold the home sharing industry accountable.
The 44-page report published by the BNA also states that their researchers suspect that up to two-thirds of Airbnb listings between November 2020 and October 2021 may also have been non-compliant. The BNA has insisted the city must do more to enforce its law on short-term rentals and crackdowns on “the most egregious violators” and impose stiffer penalties for such violations.
Attorney Nancy Hanna, who is a spokeswoman for the coalition, said city fines simply become a cost of doing business for short-term rental hosts unless regulations are strictly enforced.
The release of the report came a week after City Attorney Mike Feuer filed a lawsuit against home-sharing company Home Away. The lawsuit accuses HomeAway of failing to provide the required valid home-sharing registration number or even a pending registration number for listings on its site after review by the city attorney’s office.
Better Neighbors LA prepared its report by doing research, scraping data from home-sharing sites and going through city archives. In response, an Airbnb representative questioned the accuracy of the report and said it was based on “questionable statistics” and was prepared by “a special interest group in the pocket of the hospitality industry”.
Airbnb spokeswoman Liz DeBold Fusco did not call BNA by name, but said the report was written solely to “undermine the ability of local residents to responsibly share their homes and benefit …to the city’s economy as a whole”. and added that Airbnb was the only such company to have reached an agreement with the city on the app. The agreement requires Airbnb to share information with the city and remove listings that the City Planning Department deems illegal.
Fusco clarified that “as part of this, we have removed thousands of listings at the request of the city, in accordance with the law – and we will continue to do so in the future”, quoted by the Time.
Planning Department spokeswoman Nora Frost responded to calls from the department to increase penalties by saying that planning had issued citations against 2,100 illegal listings since 2019. She also noted that listings for short-term rentals had fallen by more than 80% since then. These lists have shrunk from 36,660 to just 6,660.
Frost added that the department has increased penalties for repeat violations, including charges ten times higher than the first.
Critics of home-sharing services say services like Airbnb, Vrbo, and other similar online companies are responsible for driving up rents in Southern California, reducing the number of affordable rentals available to residents. residents. They feel that home sharing harms hotel workers and that hosts do not take care to select tenants who cause public disturbance to other tenants of the properties where they share their home.
Park La Brea resident Elden Rhoads says she experienced such disruption personally when two units on the same floor she lives were rented by two groups of college-aged young men. They played loud music without consideration for the neighbors and drank. Rhoads said, quoted by Time“They were coming in and out, slamming doors, smoking in the common hallway, smoking in the stairwell – both tobacco and marijuana.”
The Home Sharing Ordinance was passed by the Los Angeles City Council in 2018. Short-term rental hosts must register their property with the city to participate in home sharing and cannot add a residence secondary or any other investment property to home sharing. service.
According to the Better Neighbors LA report, their researchers deemed a listing to be non-compliant if it did not have a city-issued registration number or if the host had made the decision to claim that their property was a hotel, motel, or bed and breakfast to get a “false exemption”. The BNA called on the city to work with short-term rental sites to put in place information-sharing agreements and open an online portal where renters can determine whether a short-term rental listing complies with the city ordinances.
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