Short Term Rentals, Including Airbnb Locations, Go Before City Committee on Tuesday

The City of Pasadena’s Department Planning and Community Development will discuss a report Tuesday on the results of consultations and meetings held last year with community members and stakeholders regarding the issue of regulating short-term rentals such as Airbnb in Pasadena.

The report will be presented before the City Council’s Economic Development and Technology Committee which will have a special meeting Tuesday, January 17.

Short-term rentals have been going on in Pasadena for some time, but more heated debates opened when online platforms, among them HomeAway and Airbnb, started advertising Pasadena properties, including residential homes, for short-term stays.

A number of neighborhood groups in the City have expressed concerns about the impact of short-term rentals in their neighborhoods. Near the Rose Bowl area, for example, residents have complained about late night parties hosted at some short-term rented homes that result in disrupted parking, littered streets and a noisy environment.

In a memorandum prepared for Tuesday’s special meeting, Pasadena’s Planning and Community Development Director David Reyes said staff conducted two community meetings in December last year to gather points of view about the proposal to regulate short-term rentals.

Staff also engaged key stakeholder groups in Pasadena, including the Pasadena HomeShare Network, a group of residents who offer hosted short-term stays at their properties and who last year offered their views favoring regulations for short-term rentals.

Reyes said his department also conducted a study of how other cities in the state and elsewhere in the U.S. regulate short-term rentals in their jurisdictions, and will provide the ED Tech Committee with the results.

Among the aspects considered in the study were whether to allow hosted or unhosted stays, limits on the number of days per year, and whether to require transient occupancy tax (TOT) remittance.

About 70 individuals attended the two meetings in December, Reyes said, most of them advocates for the short-term rental market and currently rent their properties short-term. Reyes said there were residents in attendance who expressed concern with short-term rentals.

Summing up the results of the consultations, Reyes said those in favor of short-term renting indicated their support for flexibility in regulations.

“Although there was a general consensus to require TOT remittance, most of the attending community members opposed a City limit on the number of days that a home could be short-rented and also were generally opposed to permitting and inspection requirements,” Reyes said. “Attendees also expressed a particular concern with why the City is taking up an issue with short-term rentals since the activity is not something new.”

The memo also mentioned that community members who were concerned with short-term rentals generally expressed apprehensions that the activity “interrupts the sense of community of Pasadena neighborhoods.”

Among the things these community members ask is that the City should impose requirements for the host to be on the property at all times, and that the host must be the legal property owner, Reyes said.

A majority of the attendees at the community meetings also supported short-term renting single-family homes, apartments and condos so long as the respective homeowners’ associations approved of the activity, and that the units were not sub-leased, the memorandum said.

In the stakeholder meetings, Reyes said staff met with representatives of Cerrell Associates, the public relations firm for HomeAway, a subsidiary platform by Expedia which promotes vacation home rentals, and a representative from the Los Angeles Short-Term Rental Alliance (LA-STRA). Both groups represent Pasadena property owners who use HomeAway as their platform for renting out their properties.

The other meeting was with the Pasadena HomeShare Network, whose members offer hosted stays at their properties and mostly use the Airbnb platform. Reyes said the Network’s members also support a permit requirement, collection of TOT, and no limit on the number of days that a property can be short-term rented. Its members, however, said they were concerned with permitting vacation home rentals where there is no host on site, and with the City imposing additional inspection requirements.

A second round of meetings with the community and stakeholder groups are planned for early this year. The Planning Department wants to present a draft of the regulations to the ED Tech Committee by February or March, and refined regulatory recommendations before the end of April.