Short-Term Vacation Rentals Are Heating Up in Ocean Beach

By Frank Gormlie

Nate Bazydlo – the vice-president of the OB Town Council – got up before the audience the other night at the monthly meeting of the Council and recounted a sad story. He had recently run into an old friend, a long-time resident of Ocean Beach, who had just been evicted out of her home of 20 years.

Seems some mystery man had approached her landlord and had offered him hundreds of dollars more a month than what Nate’s friend was paying. The landlord took the deal, kicked the friend out, and leased it to the mystery man.  And without moving in, the mystery man made the place into a short-term vacation rental.  He didn’t even have to buy it, he just leased it, and then turned around and now leases it out to high-paying vacationers.

There was a collective – and knowing – moan from the audience when Nate finished the story. It was a story of a type that many had heard before, as it seems everyone has a horror story about these rentals these days.

Short-term vacation rentals. The issue of these controversial vacation rentals is heating up once again in Ocean Beach.

The Town Council may hold a public forum on them at their May meeting.  The OB Planning Board has a working sub-committee on them. And community planners from throughout the beach area are networking and strategizing about how to combat them, including the OB planners.

Some of the other beach planning committees are ahead of Ocean Beach, I was told by Blake Herrschaft, the chair of the OB sub-committee on vacation rentals, but OB is catching up. His sub-committee is trying to collect data to quantify the effects of the rentals, such as the loss of housing stock in OB. He estimated that there are, at any time, about 400 vacation rentals in Ocean Beach. And there were, in effect, 720 displaced people in OB in 2016 due to short-term rentals. These numbers are significant.

The Ocean Beach Planning Board took the bull by the horns back in September of 2015 and sponsored a town hall meeting on short-term rentals, co-hosted by the Town Council. There was a general consensus of that there needs to be regulation, and Board members felt that STVRs are a threat to the community. Now home-shares are different- where the owner rents out a room, or when the owners goes on vacation and rent out their residence.

The issue centers on the mini-hotels set up throughout residential neighborhoods at the beach that rent out to vacationers who party, make lots of noise, leave trash, take up parking, and generally disturb the tranquility of the neighborhood. But noise, trash, traffic, parking are just the surface issues; the deeper ones are the loss of housing stock in a mainly-renting community like OB, the displacement of long-term residents – like Nate’s friend, and a more sweeping and threatening effect – literally, the loss of community – where on certain blocks, there are no more actual residents, only vacationers and time-sharers. And government services have been replaced by private security teams and trash collectors.

Naturally, there has been significant push-back against any opposition to STVRs by Airbnb and other commercial sites that promote vacation rentals. Now that they are paying some monies to the city, they advertise their “contributions” to the local economy with stunning reports of how much they have earned hosts and how much they have contributed in taxes.  Airbnb and other such businesses are beginning to finance the election campaigns of politicians who support them, further muddling up the waters.

Yet it has been determined that most of the people who lease out their units on places like Airbnb are not “mom and pops”, but rather realty and property management companies.

On the other side, groups such as Save San Diego Neighborhoods formed and have been able to focus the opposition and make everyone aware of Airbnb’s funding efforts.

In April of 2016, the San Diego Planning Commission grappled with an unsuccessful effort to craft an option to the chaotic mess of how there were being viewed by the City – an option where STVRs were allowed with a 20-minimum day stay.

Meanwhile, planning boards and town councils at the beach were being inundated with complaints from local residents about the noise and disturbances they experienced from short-term rentals in their neighborhoods.  The city council committee assigned to deal with the issue, floundered. Opposing armies faced off at committee hearings, and political leaders like Councilwoman Lorie Zafp of District 2 – which includes most of the beaches affected by STVRs – couldn’t find consensus and the city froze.

The OB Town Council sent an open letter to Mayor Kevin Faulconer and the City Council in August of 2016. In it they stated:

The City of San Diego has not yet adopted a new ordinance to resolve STVRs and resultant impacts to our communities. Until STVRs are formally addressed by the City Council and the Mayor with a new ordinance and/or revisions to San Diego’s municipal code, the OBTC is in full support of the position of Save San Diego Neighborhoods as stated:

Enforce the existing Municipal Code, which makes STVR unlawful in all San Diego residential zones, to rid our communities of absentee-owner commercial mini-hotels. Amend the Municipal Code to allow true “home-sharing” (room rentals with owners present) and home-swapping with some restrictions. Create and implement effective enforcement policies to support those positions.

Save San Diego Neighborhoods is requesting the City of San Diego to enforce its current municipal code as it relates to Visitor Accommodations which prohibits Short Term Vacation Rentals within residential neighborhoods. We call upon Mayor Faulconer to enforce the current Municipal Code until this matter is resolved legislatively by our City Council.

Then in November 2016, Barbara Bry was elected to the Council seat representing La Jolla. One of the central planks to her platform was her opposition to short-term rentals. From there, there was some momentum to develop a Council consensus in strictly enforcing them. Whether one will develop that favors huge restrictions is yet to be seen.

Plus, newly-elected City Attorney Mara Elliott in March of this year issued a legal opinion that determined that STVRs were illegal in all parts of the City. There was some momentary joy in the short-term opposition camp.

But later in the month, on March 24th the Smart Growth and Land Use council committee met and could not come to consensus of which of the three major proposals from staff to favor. Here’s the La Jolla Light report:

The staff report proposes two approaches to the problem with three options each — one for whole-home rentals, which committee members could not agree upon, and one for house-sharing, which obtained the required votes to pass as a recommendation to the full Council. The committee voted to allow home-sharing (renting out parts of one’s home while the owner is on the premises) of up to two bedrooms in all single- and multi-family zones without any limitations of use. …

Home-sharing, with three to five bedrooms for rent, would need compliance with the “limited use” regulations, which include the requirement of an annual permit for homeowners, the existence of an occupancy agreement and a designated-local contact available during the use of the property as a home-share.

The whole-house rental proposal consists of three options, the strictest one requiring a 21-day minimum stay for most residential zones, and the most permissive one allowing whole-house rentals in many multi-family and commercial zones with compliance of the “limited use” regulations.

City staff will likely formalize these options – and the one decision – and present them to the full City Council this Fall.

And this Fall Council meeting is a target date for people like Blake Herrschaft, chair of the OB Planning Board sub-committee on STRVs. He wants his committee and the full Board to come up with draft language they could present as another option on short-term rentals. Herrschaft and his diligent committee members want to collect their data by this summer so they could use it as a basis for their option.

This showdown on short term vacation rentals will affect all of us, and especially the large body of permanent renters in Ocean Beach who find less and less units available as more and more units are turned into vacation rentals. Renters in OB are the soul of the village. So, it turns out it’s a battle for the soul of the community.