— from Greg and Heather Dew Oaksen —
We are concerned and worried about our island communities!
Short term vacation rentals reduce availability of affordable long-term rental housing making it almost impossible for families and workers to find adequate housing. Substantial income potential provides an incentive to convert residences to short term rentals. However, short-term rentals increase rental costs, and since the value of property is based in part on income potential, it also drives up the price of property compounding the affordability problem. Currently there are off-island investment vehicles whose profits go off island. This seems especially to be a problem on Orcas. In the Eastsound Water District alone vacation rentals grew from 40 in 2014 to 150 currently.
If this goes unchecked we will reach a tipping point where only occasional visitors and the wealthy will be able to afford to live on Orcas. This will result in a significant change in our social fabric creating a one-dimensional community where families and workers that provide talent, vitality, and diversity are unable to live.
A certain amount of vacation rentals is acceptable and provides needed economic support but there needs to be a limit. Jurisdictions such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Fresno, and Denver have restricted short term rentals. San Juan County needs to adopt a moratorium to evaluate this growing problem and find a viable and sensible solution. Please contact our council representatives Rick Hughes (360-298-5103), Bill Watson (360-370-7473), and Jamie Peterson (360-378-2989) and voice your concern.
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Thank you for this suggestion. I made it almost 2 years ago in an email to the County Council. As usual, they did not even acknowledge receiving the correspondence much less comment on the content. I strongly support a moratorium on the issuance of Vacation Rental Permits while a comprehensive study of the impact of visitors is undertaken and solutions generated and implemented before lifting the moratorium. Note that Washington State’s Growth Management Act does not require any county to address visitor impacts. San Juan County is currently updating its comprehensive plan as required by GMA. However, just because GMA doesn’t require a study of visitor impacts doesn’t mean such a study, and appropriate regulations, are irrelevant. Our Vision Statement is the controlling component of the Comprehensive Plan, and the vision statement certainly permits/authorizes, indeed requires, the county to fulfill it. More info on the issue of unrestricted growth is at KeepSanJuansWild.org
I completely agree
Yes, the quarterly “sky is falling” post attacking vacationers who spend money on Orcas and thus provide jobs and sales for business. I knew it would rise again like the Phoenix! Let the tirade begin…
Thank you Heather, Greg and Joe….for your ongoing voices in support of adequate affordable housing and keeping an eye on unrestricted growth. I will add, let’s not forget the lack of neighbors and neighborliness, that can be felt in neighborhoods with several empty (vacation rental) homes.
Neil, some of those summer jobs you mention are being filled by people who are living in cars, deserted trailers, and even in the woods.
As a person who has lived in their car, the problem is not only to do with “housing,” but with the privilege this gives to a few to behave unscrupulously or to reward unscrupulous behavior of others desperate to survive.
You may not “mine” shared resources for your own personal benefit and then spend your loot to shelter yourself from accountability with the fig leaf of trickle-down economics and the subterfuge of captured governance.
We’ve had this discussion before. Despite the constant repetition of the claim, there is no evidence that short term vacation rentals reduce the availability of affordable long-term rental housing. I believe that the County planners have provided support for this statement. Someone with a $500,000 house is not going to be renting at what some consider “affordable.” The mortgage, taxes and upkeep of such property would require rent far in excess of what many believe is “affordable.” The Venn diagram of housing attractive enough to succeed in the VR game and housing that would work as affordable long-term rentals has very little overlap.
The issues, as I see them, are land use rules that greatly increase the cost of new construction and limit the implementation of innovative solutions–such as employer-sponsored housing, tiny home villages, and other non-stand SFH construction–and the failure of many island businesses to pay a living wage.
As Joe points out, we are operating with a dearth of data–about workers’ actual incomes, how many workers we need, the rental rates of vacation rentals vs. long term rentals, the number of tourists the island receives each year, the number of people seeking housing at any one time, and on and on–answers to questions that come to mind whenever this discussion gets started.
One data point I’m eager to see is the number of paid VR permits issued under the new regulations.
I knew people living in tents and vans on Orcas in 1976, and I don’t recall them complaining.
I feel that some of these comments do not quite address the topic at hand:
“Tipping Point”
We are saying that ..
being an island, Orcas places absolute limitations on the American exceptionalist mythology that privilege is all “self made.”
..that survival of the fittest-
makes this a narrow nasty and brutish community where some with privilege simply do not [have to] understand:
-living in a tent is only a valid lifestyle .. if it is a choice not a necessity;
-working as a housecleaner in a trickle-down economy is only an opportunity if the stream has not been dammed by the person who’s toilet you must clean [with your college degree];
-“land use” limitations only matter if there is more land to USE without the benefit of special privilege [or well placed cronies];
-converting a $million dollar home into a vacation rental to pay fees, begs the question of why build that home here, now, if you’re not going to live in it and no one else can afford to either [unless they made their $$ elsewhere];
-funding healthcare with private money that is broken if you cannot afford expensive/time-consuming private-duty/off-island care;
-bragging about the ability to drive a neighbor from the island because of a lack of respect for them.
This is a shameful state of affairs, I_M_H_O.
“Capitalism is the most extreme of ideologies, perhaps the most extreme ever.”
– Walter Benjamin
Bravo! Well thought and written. I couldn’t agree with this article more. In Eastsound, we had to have a moratorium on water hookups some years back because of the steep growth curve. It is GOOD to stop and take stock. Sometimes a moratorium is necessary to take a step back, assess, ask the right questions, get all the information, and try to be fair about how we will address the problem – because one size does not fit all.
There has to be some way to rate this in terms of fairness and contribution or detriment to community and quality of life for everyone. You can’t legislate it – but there are givers, and there are takers. What you can legislate is protection against takers.
A family who is land-rich and money-poor due to inflated real estate values, and lives here and needs the extra income in order to stay living here is one thing.
People who “invest” in real estate and turn their holdings into absentee-landlord cash-cows, caring only for their own profit margins and giving nothing to this community – including their own involvement in it – that’s another thing entirely.
It’s simple: No new vacay rental permits for up to 5 years, unless it can be demonstrated that the extra income needed is a NECESSITY – and no lifting of the moratorium until we have concrete solutions and legal protections in place. That would give us time to take stock and do our homework on carrying capacity, maximum buildout impacts, visitor impacts (the Parks study gave us an inkling that we are ALREADY at or beyond carrying capacity) and really digest what that would mean on these small islands. We can’t sustain it.
We also need to redefine what we mean by “transient” rentals because as it stands now, “long term” rental is defined by this county as anything longer than 30 days!
Thank you Greg and Heather, I’ll have my spin in a few days but first here’s some more info on other Tourist destinations having trouble with similar things.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/13/new-orleans-airbnb-treme-short-term-rentals
The Guardian / Observer (Tobias Jones) 1/06/19
Why Italy regrets its Faustian pact with tourist cash–
“There is a sense that Italy is a victim of its own success – it is the fifth most-visited country in the world, with 52.4 million tourists a year – and can no longer cope.”
“The trouble is that the Venetian and Florentine tourist tax will only exacerbate the problem. It won’t reduce numbers, but merely encourage the tourists’ sense that they are in a financially exploitative relationship. And if you have turnstiles at the city gates, the authenticity they so desperately seek is replaced by disappointment in a tinny confection, akin to a theme park.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/06/cost-of-tourism-in-italy#img-1
Peg, you said–
“We’ve had this discussion before. Despite the constant repetition of the claim, there is no evidence that short term vacation rentals reduce the availability of affordable long-term rental housing.”
Despite your comment above surely you can see why people are equating the two as they are. I mean, it does not seem extraordinary to normal thinking to question the county’s current position on VR’s. When on one hand there’s a dearth of information available on the subject, while at the same time we’re witnessing a dramatic rise in short-term vacation rentals at the same time that we’re witnessing a dramatic drop in long-term rentals. Under these two considerations to belie as fact that one does not affect the other, (and significantly so), simply does not pass the average person’s sniff test. Many of us, myself included, both have friends who’ve converted their once long-term rentals into short-term vacation rentals, while also having other friends who’ve been booted out of their long-term rentals because of the same.
You said, “I believe that the County planners have provided support for this statement,” (the statement being that there is no evidence that short term vacation rentals reduce the availability of affordable long-term rental housing).
Though it’s not incumbent upon you to go down the rabbit hole and research the numbers for us you do, once again, infer that in spite of the dearth of information that’s available on the subject– that there is enough official information for us to believe that the two are not related, (not significantly so). It would be helpful to see what “support” there is for this claim. Please, (you, or anybody) share this information with us if you will. This would perhaps provide some clarification. Thank you.
Sadie–there’s simply no way that the County can (or should) distinguish between people who “need” money and other people who choose to rent their property as vacation rentals. It would be unconstitutional and impossible to administer. For example, who “needs” what, and who decides? Should the homeowner who finds the recent dramatic increase in our property taxes and electricity costs overwhelming financially be denied a VR permit because her home is worth $500,000, but one whose home is worth $250,000 be allowed one?
Just a fyi https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/02/study-airbnb-cities-rising-home-prices-tax/581590/
And here is what Seattle did from AirBNB.
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/869/seattle–wa
From the cited “study”: “Parsing just how much of those bumps were natural growth and how much was Airbnb-related has proven difficult. In Boston, “a one standard deviation increase in Airbnb listings … relative to total housing units is correlated with a 5.9 percent decrease in the number of rental units offered for rent,” University of Massachusetts researchers wrote, which they say then translates into the price changes outlined above. But take the Brooklyn neighborhoods Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, which observed a 41 percent jump in the number of Airbnb listings from 2012 to 2016, for example: While rents there leapt an average of about $131 per year, according to the SSRN working paper, only about $27 of it can be attributed to Airbnb.”
The lion’s share of research has been conducted in large, expensive cities in boom times. The island is a unique rural environment. I maintain that the types of housing used for vacation rentals would not be available for long-term rentals at affordable rates in 90% of the cases, and believe that we should be looking at data across all areas of inquiry. Also, we need to look at what is considered “affordable.” The old 30% test doesn’t hold true for many on the island. And the “newly-arrived family of five with two dogs looking for a rental house with three bedrooms and a yard for $800”–the kind of post seen so often on the social media rental boards–speaks to the additional problem of unreasonable expectations.
I hope that Planning releases its data on VRs soon.