The hotel next door | Notice – Sentinel of the Sun

Thirty years ago, I bought a house in a residential area. You know the genre: single-family homes, backyards, sidewalks, older couples and young families, garage sales, children’s sports teams. A very American neighborhood: Hollywood Lakes in Hollywood, Florida.

Hollywood Lakes was established in the 1920s, but most of the homes here were built in the 50s. My husband and I purchased one of these homes and, like many young couples, remodeled and updated our new home. We had children. Our neighbors had children. Our children grew up with their children. We loved it here.

Now I have a full-time hotel near my house, owned by three investors and managed by a multinational. The company has a marketing and maintenance department and has taken over a dozen other houses nearby. The house is a short-term vacation rental, available for rent through Airbnb, VRBO, and now even Marriott. Strangers are constantly arriving. Noise from pool parties is a constant. There are two more across the street and more to come, as three houses in my building have recently been sold. Police visits to these houses are frequent.

Airbnb started with the idea that people could rent out rooms in their homes on a short-term basis, which would earn the owner extra money. Individual homeowners could capitalize on what is often their greatest asset: their home. This activity is not a problem for a neighborhood and will, in my opinion, always be legal. But it became something else. The vast majority of vacation rentals here are not owner-managed.

When we purchased our home, the zoning was clear: Residential Single Family. No commercial use. One could not operate a business from home except under very limited conditions: no customers could visit and only one additional employee could work there. (Here I should mention that as of 2020, due to changes in state law, a homeowner in Florida can now operate just about any business from home as long as the home is their primary residence. Of course, this law does not cover vacation rentals where the owner does not live.)

Hollywood Lakes’ proximity to the beach has made us the target of a new industry: turning residential homes into hotels through Airbnb, VRBO, Marriott and others. A few scattered vacation rentals had been in the neighborhood for years, causing some minor issues. Starting in 2020, the COVID demand for getaways that didn’t involve large, crowded hotels caused this new business to burn across the Hollywood lakes.

The neighborhood has deteriorated at a rapid pace. In 2021, one in three sales were to an LLC, presumably investors. About 13% of homes here are now short-term vacation rentals – really, no more than private hotels and motels.

I no longer know my neighbors. The fabric of a once charming and friendly community has been shredded. And it was done in a place that was and still is strictly zoned as a single family residential community. But those who live here feel that our zoning has been radically changed, without a vote.

It makes sense that hotel business would be illegal in a neighborhood of single-family homes. However, since the people “resident” there (and no other services are provided), Florida considers this to be a permitted residential use of a home. Under the influence of industry lobbyists, the state reserved the right to allow short-term rentals, unless a city already had a compensatory law in effect. Hollywood didn’t. The best Hollywood can do is regulate it around the edges.

If Hollywood could establish a rule that to rent your home in a single-family residential neighborhood there is a minimum rental term of 60 days, our problems would be largely solved. That sounds reasonable for a neighborhood like this, but Tallahassee says we can’t.

The people who are in this business are not owners. Not in the traditional sense. They have turned a house into a business, but they have property rights. So we have the situation where in an area with residential zoning that specifically prohibits commercial uses, the house next door can become a hotel, as long as they don’t actually call it that.

But it’s a hotel near my house. To call it otherwise is a lie.

Lori Tofexis has resided in Hollywood Lakes for nearly 30 years. She is a member of the Hollywood Lakes Civic Association and a math teacher and tutor.

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