Editor,
Since the 1990s, all Laguna Beach homeowners have had the right to apply for an administrative use permit for short-term rentals on their home. The moratorium on acceptance of applications will be lifted at the end of October, and anyone can apply. That has been the law since the 1990s. Now we have a group of folks in town who want to take that right away from all of you homeowners. Somehow they think they know better than you or your neighbors what is best for you to do with your own home. The folks want to prevent you from ever being able to rent your own house out when you go out of town, prevent you from ever doing a home exchange with somebody, prevent you from ever hosting anyone in your home. However, for some reason, if you want to do any of this for longer than 30 days at a time, they have no problem with it. Weird isn’t it?
There are a group of resident homeowners who have come together once we learned that this right was potentially going to be stripped from us and formed Home Sharing 4 Laguna. We want to preserve property rights. We want to give homeowners the right to apply for permits. We want those permits to be available to even less people than they are available to now. Because issues that arise with any short-term rental are usually because there is no homeowner there to manage it, we want to limit permits to only owner occupied homes. We want regulation. We want occupancy tax revenue from these rentals for the city.
It’s really quite straightforward, no one should be stripping away property rights from homeowners. We all bought our homes with these rights in place…they are valuable, they allow us options for earning revenue that is often needed to keep our homes. Who the heck are they to try to get the city to take these valuable property rights away?
We are so glad we have a brilliant City Council that is creating reasonable, solid regulation to protect homeowner’s rights and the quiet enjoyment of our city.
Greg Burzell, Laguna Beach
