The Ocean Beach Planning Board, historically, has led the resistance to the community being inundated with a flood of short-term vacation rentals. This history involves the last five years – and much has changed – and nothing has changed – except coastal residents’ awareness of the problem.
Most recently, however, Councilwoman Jen Campbell has been pushing her plan to allow the vacation rentals into the city. This week, in fact, she’s taking her plan to the San Diego Planning Commission.
Whether this is on the agenda of the Planning Board’s committee is not quiet clear – but we’re sure it will come up. The Board’s committee (actually an ad-hoc subcommittee) that covers short-term rentals meets Tuesday night, December 1. (The meeting is held electronically via Webex and one needs to register for the meeting – go here to register.)
Here is the official agenda:
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There are more reasons to oppose the Campbell proposal than can be addressed in this comment. I was in a short term rental meeting with Councilmember Campbell shortly after she was elected to office. She was firmly committed to “Enforce the Code.”. Only Brigette Browning, president of the hotel workers union, Unite Here, expressed a different view, and her thought was to throw Mission Beach under the bus, which is what happened. Apparently, the only community group who Campbell’s staffer conferred with on the development of the plan was the MBTC, and only those people on the Board who highjacked the town council. AirBnB entered the San Diego market in 2008 without any interaction with the City and knowing that the City has little appetite for confrontation. And now with somewhere between 13,000 and 16,000 active STRs in the City Limits, has decided it is ready to negotiate. Finally, no other beach community from Los Angeles to San Diego has been more saturated with STRs by speculators and investors. There are about 2600 STRs per square mile of area in MB compared to about 30 for the City. MB is being destroyed; the first step to recovery is to eliminate the carve out, and then curtail STRs within the City to no more than 2,800. Then let the lottery decide the allocation of permits.