The STRO Ordinance aims to ensure short-term rentals of less than a month are regulated.
By Jeanette Quezada / 7SanDiego / June 29 -30, 2025
Starting Tuesday July 1, short-term rental property owners will be able to apply for a tier four occupancy license.
Applications will be limited to a 45-day period that will end on August 15th.
Existing license holders are eligible to apply to be added to the whole home short-term rental list, also known as the Tier 4 list. If they are approved, they will have to cancel their existing lower-tier license.
The city closed applications more than two years ago because it had reached capacity.
“It’s probably due to the fact that so many people have been placed out of the market, so places opened up,” Marty Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman said the scale of short-term vacation rentals has grown so much, it has priced some locals out of the housing market, especially at beachfront locations like Mission Beach.
“The place behind me is the place we had to sell because taxes became so ridiculous and the new owner said, yeah, we’re going to double the rents,” Zimmerman said.
When he sold this apartment complex, 20 people had to find a new place to live, including some who lived there for nearly 40 years.
“They were in tears, literally like ‘Where am I going to go? ‘… and I go, ‘I wish I could help you, I don’t know. I don’t have the money to keep the place running,’” Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman said he remembers when short-term vacation rentals used to be seasonal, but said in the last few years, that has changed.
“The cost of doing business in San Diego is so high that you have to either raise the rents or you sell,” he said.
Gary Katz helped draft some of the short-term residential occupancy ordinances with various groups.
He said the STRO Ordinance was intended to encourage accountability for vacation rentals and set a cap on the number of rentals.
According to city data, Mission Beach has the largest percentage of Short-term rentals at 30 percent, compared to the rest of San Diego County.
Katz said having a huge amount of short-term vacation rental properties in one neighborhood erodes the sense of community.
“It makes it less of a neighborhood and more of a hotel and I think a lot of the properties here are treated as hotels, and the people that vacation here, treat the area as if it were their playground to use and abuse,” Katz said.
Katz said when the city initiated the short-term vacation rental licenses, there were a number of violations of the ordinance that went unenforced.
“I think this is a budgetary issue; if the city is really concerned about the budget, enforce it. If you have laws on the books and property owners that are violating a clear ordinance, enforce that, charge the maximum amount of fines, and it will help with compliance and it will help the budget,” Katz said.
Jay Goldberg is a short-term rental compliance watchdog.
He used the city’s short-term rental license database and the country’s property parcel data to keep track of the number of units at each property that have licenses.
He said short-term rentals have a significant impact on the availability of housing for locals.
“It’s attractive to investors to overbid for it because the income for Airbnb is so much higher than for a local renter,” Jay Goldberg said.
Goldberg said 50% of short-term rentals in San Diego are one to two-bedroom rentals that could be used for locals.
“I would like to see them cap the number of units in a building that can be used as short-term rentals, if it’s one owner that owns the whole building,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg said the city should hold corporations that own short-term rentals accountable when they fail to comply with the ordinance.
In a statement to NBC 7, Councilmember Jennifer Campbell –[the architect of the controversial STVR ordinance] wrote in part,
“I am committed to continuing to foster a positive and respectful relationship between San Diego residents and visitors as we enter this next phase of licensing.”
Whole home short term rentals represent a cancer on a community, killing off (displacing) residents in large numbers in Mission Beach. The STR representatives who live in Mission Beach, Ms. Wise, claimed that the only issue of consequence for STRs is the nuisance factor, only requiring that the bad actors be removed. Wrong!
The real issue is the displacement of over 2,000 long term residents. These are the number one losers followed closely by those long term residents who stay in Mission Beach and are subjected to the overwhelming numbers of STR visitors. The next group who lose are all of the small businesses in Mission Beach, the restaurants and bike shops, liquor stores, and grocery stores. While their businesses do very well during the high season summer months, they would do even better if the large number of displaced residents were back buying year around.
By way of example, Ms. Mattison, owner of the Olive Cafe and bakery, flipped when whole home STR owner/investors threatened to take her menus out of their visitor packages if she did not support the short term rentals in Mission Beach.
There are only 2 winners, the investor owners and the STR management companies. But it is big money for these winners, so big that they will lie, threaten, make wild accusation (I was accused of being anti-Semitic), assault, and file a SLAPP suit to keep me from participating on the town council.
Perhaps surprisingly, the City and therefore the tax-payers are also big losers. How, you ask? Whole home short term rentals investors/owners use advanced software to maximize their Average Daily Rate (ADR) and their occupancy. The largest increases occur running up to the three summer months; these increases are picked up by real estate people, who then propagate them across the City. This leads to some marginalized residents (those paying around 50 percent or more of their monthly incomes to rent and utilities), resulting in some being pushed into homelessness.
And who pays for the homeless to be rehoused? We the taxpayers. In Los Angeles, analyses showed that the cost to rehouse the homeless caused by whole home short term rentals exceeded the revenue to the City from STR transient occupancy tax (TOT).
In summary, while the relatively small number of whole home short term rentals owners/investors are the big winners, all the rest of us lose. It is time to reverse the whole home STR trends, to push back and either push to ban this infection on our communities, or at least offer incentives for STR owner/investors to convert back to long term housing units.
Very good analysis, but you left out one thing under ‘who profits’ – our corrupt politicians. Like Jen Campbell, who campaigned on getting rid of STVRs and, once in office, immediately went to work to legalize them. Or all those who profit from massive overbuilding in residential neighborhoods, pretending this is a solution.