Unless you live in your home or on your property in Santa Barbara County, a majority of the Board of Supervisors wants to ban your right to use it as a short-term rental property.
After a morning hearing stretched into the afternoon, the board voted along North/South County lines (with 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam and 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino dissenting) to direct staff to come back with an ordinance outlawing short-term rentals (STRs), such as those booked through airbnb.com and vrbo.com, in residential areas of the county and allowing them in commercially/industrially zoned areas.
“This has been one of the most difficult issues,” 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann said during the June 6 hearing. “People, quite frankly, don’t want to live in a neighborhood that’s transient.”
Although Lavagnino and Adam agreed that county residents are looking for a neighborhood to live in, they both advocated for creating some sort of permitting or business license structure that would allow people to utilize their properties for short-term rentals and give the county room for enforcement on issues like noise complaints.
“The rental-hood versus the neighborhood argument, I totally get,” Adam said. “I think this is a bit over the top, just outright banning in residential areas … which is 92 percent of what’s out there [for short-term rentals].”
After his comments, though, the board unanimously voted (with urging from 1st District Supervisor Das Williams) to direct staff to create a permitting process and regulatory structure that would allow for home-stays and farm-stays in certain residential and agriculturally zoned areas of the county—meaning, the owner of the property lives on the property. Many residents said they were using short-term rentals to supplement their mortgage payments and be able to stay in their homes.
“I know many people who have been displaced by STRs. … Even [the industry’s] own analysis indicates this,” Williams said of long-term renters. “The most important issue to me is housing availability. To me, it is not part of my job to facilitate people owning a second home.”
He did say, however, that part of his job is to ensure that people could keep a roof over their heads, even if that includes income from short-term rentals. Several county residents who spoke during public comment said they did exactly that, adding that because they lived on the property, they could also ensure that people were respectful of their homes and the neighborhoods (noise was a big complaint from STR detractors).
The vote supervisors took on June 6 largely mirrored the recommendations of the Planning Commission, except for the exception made for home-stays and farm-stays and one other exception the 3-2 majority asked for: to allow for those residential properties on the South Coast that have been historically used as vacation rentals to continue having the ability to do so.
To which Adam replied: “If it’s good there, it should be good everywhere.”
This article appears in Jun 8-15, 2017.