My next-door neighbor in Boise is a short-term rental. Will new regulation do anything?
While the goal may be noble, I fear the city of Boise’s attempt to chronicle and regulate short-term rentals might not be worth the trouble.
I’ve been back and forth on the issue of short-term rentals – residences that get rented out a couple of days at a time through such companies as Airbnb and Vrbo.
About three years ago, I wrote about my experience with a short-term rental on my street in Boise’s West End with an absentee owner. At the time, then-Mayor Dave Bieter was proposing some restrictions on short-term rentals, including prohibiting absentee owners, which sounded like a good idea to me.
It’s one thing for an owner who lives in the home to rent out a basement apartment or an accessory dwelling unit, I argued, and quite another matter to have an absentee owner simply use their house as a hotel room. I saw first-hand the negative effects of the absentee owner rental on our street.
The front lawn had died, and the backyard had become a mess of discarded wood pallets and overgrown weeds.
I argued at the time that the absentee owners — because they didn’t have to look at it every day — didn’t care whether the property fell into disrepair, nor did the temporary, two-day tenants care about the long-term conditions of the house or the impact on the neighborhood.
In the time since, that corner lot appears to have long-term renters and has since been fixed up, but our immediate next-door neighbors sold their house, and the new owners have turned it into a short-term rental.
The new owners have done an incredible job of fixing up the place and putting in beautiful new landscaping. I daresay it’s one of the nicest houses on our street now.
Here’s another thing I didn’t expect: The house is actually quieter now than when the previous neighbors lived there. I haven’t been keeping track, but if I had to guess, I’d say the house has guests maybe two or three times a month, usually just for two or three days at a time. “Parties” in the adjacent backyard are usually so tame, we don’t even notice them.
I understand the city trying to get a handle on the number and location and types of short-term rentals in the city. The city can keep an eye on a big company coming into Boise and buying up a bunch of houses or apartments and turning them into short-term rentals. I think this kind of information and data is good to have.
While my experience with our short-term rental neighbor has been a good one, I recognize that might not be the case for others. One of the goals of the ordinance is to “maintain neighborhood integrity,” by addressing noise and parking complaints. Given the highly transient nature of short-term renters, that’s understandable.
But one of the goals of the city ordinance is to determine whether short-term rentals are having a detrimental effect on housing affordability.
When it comes to my short-term rental neighbor, here’s a perfectly fine house that probably would have been considered a starter house back in the day, sitting completely vacant 70-80% of the time.
This house could be filled with a young family just starting out or a young professional wanting to transition from being renters to homeowners. But scratch that house off the list.
So how big of a problem is this in the bigger picture?
So far, 132 short-term rental properties have registered with the city of Boise since the ordinance went into effect May 4.
“Our goal is to educate and to seek compliance,” Deputy City Clerk Jamie Heinzerling told me in a phone interview. “This is something that’s really new in the city. It’s new for us as a city, new for those that have short-term rentals. So we’re really just trying to get the word out at this point.”
Mostly single-family residences have registered, but also duplexes, fourplexes, condos, townhouses, individual rooms and accessory dwelling units, Heinzerling said.
According to AirDNA, a short-term rental analytics firm, there are 1,272 active short-term rentals in the city of Boise. Of those, 1,155 are full-house rentals, while 116 are private room rentals.
The 2020 Census puts the total number of households in the city of Boise at 94,449. Of that, 79,024 are single-family homes, condos and townhouses but not multi-family units, according to the Ada County Assessor’s office.
Those numbers don’t suggest that short-term rentals present a major problem in Boise. They certainly don’t suggest that they would provide much upward pressure on home prices.
The cause of high housing prices is simply that demand is outstripping supply, as more and more people are moving to the Treasure Valley and builders can’t keep up.
If the city of Boise — and all the other cities in the Treasure Valley, for that matter — really wants to tackle our skyrocketing home prices, what they should do is incentivize the building of housing units of all kinds.
Rather than inventory short-term rentals, I’d rather see the city hire a flood of building inspectors and permit processors to speed up the building process to light speed.
Boise City Council’s vote on the ordinance was split, with two council members, Patrick Bageant and Luci Willits, voting against it. I understand concerns about safety, parking and negative impacts to neighbors.
But if the city thinks short-term rentals will explain a cause for lack of affordable housing, they’re looking at the wrong problem and the wrong solution.
