Rental Ban Intrudes on Property Rights

You are right, Margaret, prohibition was an extreme overreaction to the evolution of shared economy for distribution of goods and services that include short term housing rentals. But this was not about applying all ordinances to all people in the same way. This is about replacing a special ordinance that made short term landlords get permits and accept city standards for participating in the private short term rental market. I am astonished by the direction the Council gave to staff to develop a radical absolute ban. I am trying to limit my exposure to every vicissitude of political folly and choose my issues and battles more carefully, so I do not attend City Council meetings vigilantly. But from skimming the Indy article on this topic I got the impression the city staff was trying to find a middle ground to regulate rather than prohibit, as I recommended to the Council when I spoke to the Council on a related procedural matter. I am not personally affected, but I appeared and spoke on the record not on the issue of short term rentals, addressing instead the Council’s procedure for declaring an emergency and imposing a moratorium on the short term rental permit process. Although the City Attorney stated that he would need to do further research to be sure, as usual he told the Council what it wanted to hear, that the moratorium was probably OK. But he was wrong. The moratorium wasn’t OK at all. It did not meet the statutory standards for suspending law on an ad hoc basis. Anyway, I guess I am just not smart enough because they ignored me. What do I know? At least councilman Steve Dicterow pointed out that there would be serious enforcement issues, but Mayor Whalen was undaunted and actually said the important thing is to “put the laws on the books” and address enforcement capacity later. Good luck on that one. No matter how it is written now that the staff has been forced into the ridiculous position of coming up with a ban instead of regulation, this new social engineering scheme imposed at the behest of Rob Zur Schmiede and Toni Iseman will be so easy to circumvent and ignore it is laughable. Those who wanted the city to protect them from short term rentals that degrade their quality of life will end up helpless, because the city is surrendering the control it had through the permitting and regulatory process. I do not rent property here, never have. I am just an observer, but without even seeing it I know how to circumvent this stupid ban. If I can figure it out so can those who do short terms rentals. What you are doing is driving the practice not underground but off the grid. You are forcing those who probably could have been leveraged into compliance and regulation to devise a way to operate outside the law. You are making the city irrelevant. Instead harnessing the power of the shared economy to make short term rental property owners and renters stakeholders in Village Laguna, this ban let’s them off the hook for all accountability to the city, and makes chumps of those who comply. Village Laguna will be unprotected from the very menace it fears because prohibition expresses a fundamentally anti-social and authoritarian impulse. Smugglers and mob bosses from LA built houses and thrived in Laguna during prohibition of liquor by the federal government, the classic case study in what happens when zealots try to use government to intrude too far into private lives. I find this silly, so I will limit my input to this comment and not make a nuisance of myself. No one wants to hear another argument by that annoying guy Hills!