Homes Are Not Hotels
Homes Are Not Hotels
What a regional housing campaign says about the failure of government.
Philip Pantuso writes in Local officials signal openness to stricter vacation rental laws about a grassroots campaign to rein in ‘vacation rentals’ in the Hudson Valley: the impacts of full-time Airbnb rentals on local housing.
The topic on everyone’s lips here and throughout the Hudson Valley is housing: where to find it, how expensive it is, will the bubble ever burst? Rising prices and shrinking inventory generated by the early pandemic exodus of New York City residents have been borne forward by rising interest rates, supply-chain issues and a transformation in how Americans work, making what once seemed like a temporary, localized bubble into a long-term affordable housing issue.
Pantuso cites my recent article in The The River on the Donut Effect, where residents of superstar cities — like NYC — are moving to the peripheral far-suburban and exurban regions, beyond normal commuting range. This and other trends combine with the endemic housing shortage in the region to drive up rents and home prices to unaffordable levels. Pantuso supplies this frightening statistic:
The number of available homes on the market in the Mid-Hudson Valley declined by 63 percent, according to a recent report by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress.
Evan Menist makes a clear summary of the Homes Are Not Hotels campaign of the For The Many activist organization:
“These short-term rentals keep valuable housing assets off the market for local residents and hollow out working-class neighborhoods by turning housing into hotels,” said Evan Menist, Poughkeepsie Common Council majority leader. “We must use all of the tools at our disposal to combat the housing crisis, and making sure that existing housing stock is available for existing residents is a huge priority to make that happen.”
This is their argument in a nutshell: make Airbnb 'hotels' illegal, which will increase supply. But will this increase supply enough to meet real demand? I don’t think so. But whatever impact it makes will be positive.
To that end, Menist is among several local elected officials who have come out in support of a new campaign by For the Many to regulate short-term rentals in several key cities throughout the Hudson Valley, including Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Newburgh, Kingston and New Paltz. Billed as “Homes Are Not Hotels,” the group announced the campaign surrounded by local officials at a news conference Thursday in Newburgh.
The campaign includes template legislation that outlines three policy goals:
A comprehensive registration system that requires documented proof of primary residence;
A complete ban on non-owner-occupied vacation rentals;
A strong enforcement system so the municipality can hold both hosts and platforms accountable, with hefty fines for violations.
Regarding Beacon’s status, Dan Aymar-Blair and Paloma Wake are quoted in the article. but absent are other city councilors and Mayor Lee Kyriakou.
Beacon Councilman Dan Aymar-Blair. “Beacon’s short-term rental law checks a lot of boxes, but one it doesn’t is we allow single-family homes to be rented out 100 days a year. If there’s an area that needs tweaking in Beacon, it’s that.
The highest-ranking municipal leader to signal his support so far is City of Newburgh Mayor Torrance Harvey. “This proposal will pass in the city of Newburgh with unanimous support,” he said.
The hard reality is that significantly more building is needed in the region. However, as Conor Dougherty and Ben Casselman investigated in We Need to Keep Building Houses, Even if No One Wants to Buy, the U.S. is caught in a double bind. The rise in inflation has led homebuilders to cut back on development projects countrywide as sales orders decline. This will lead to a tighter market when interest rates fall and pent-up demand returns in 2023 or beyond. Absent a huge intervention by the Federal government — hard to imagine in the political climate of today — this is a foregone conclusion.
As I wrote in Yes In My Backyard,
The Hudson Valley region forms a microcosm within the national housing crisis: all the pressures affecting affordable housing elsewhere are present here. We’ve seen the influx of new residents moving from urban centers because of the pandemic, for example, and the rising prices that started even before COVID-19 have only accelerated.
The same barriers to countering the housing crisis exist here, as well. In other parts of the country, state legislatures, such as Oregon, have passed new laws that directly attack residential zoning, which more than any other factor has slowed the building of new housing where people want to live and work. Bills have been introduced in the New York State Senate and Assembly that propose a top-down overhaul of zoning regulations, in essence standardizing zoning ordinances across the state that relate to ADUs and removing many of the prerogatives of municipal zoning boards that historically have blocked higher density developments in general, and ADUs specifically.
But so far, New York has refused to act.
Activist groups like For The Many are trying to step in where community and state governments have failed to act.
I am reminded of the line from Bertold Brecht’s Galileo, ‘Unhappy is the land that needs a hero’.
For The Many is acting heroically, and that is a sign of our institutions failing us.