President of the Board of Supervisors David Chiu has revised his regulations on Airbnb to strengthen residency requirements on single-family home and enforcement. You can read about all of the changes here. The proposal now goes before the Land Use Committee on September 15th and then the full board.
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Chiu’s changes are odd. Moving enforcement from DBI (which has inspectors and a long history of enforcing code violations) to Planning (which does not and mainly deals with proposed changes) does not sound to me like regulatory tightening at all.
If (hypothetically speaking, of course 🙂 I were to choose to ignore the city’s regulations on this matter, I’d actually prefer enforcement to be in the experienced and under-resourced hands of the Planning Department. They are mostly pen-pushers.
The rest looks like fluff to me. The question really is whether most people currently doing short-term lets will bother with a ponderous registration system and pay a hotel tax to the city, when they do not agree with these regulations and taxes, and where enforcement is very likely to continue to be sparse and lax.
I suspect that it will be business as usual for most short-term letters. The city really needs to make doing long-term lets more attractive rather than hopelessly trying to outlaw any and all alternative uses.