Controls vs Property Rights

It appears our local government agencies in recent months have increased their push to benefit the general population at the expense of individual property owners, to the point where it may become a burden to own real estate. And to add a new twist to an old saying, it appears that many of these proposed measures could be characterized as “too much, too late”.

At the county level, the Board of Supervisors recently formed a Short-Term Rental Ad Hoc Subcommittee, consisting of Supervisors Koenig and Cummings to develop amendments to the County’s Vacation & Hosted Rental ordinances. The proposed amendments include the creation of a county-wide cap on vacation rentals and hosting platform responsibility to quickly take down unpermitted listings. Additional amendments could include a 24/7 complaint hotline, limitations on density, and tenant protections. 

These changes aim to balance the economic benefits of short-term rentals with the need for neighborhood stability, housing protections, and regulatory oversight. Unfortunately, they will also limit the ability of property owners to offset their high costs of ownership with the benefits of a free market-based system. The rationale is to preserve housing, but the types of housing that will be preserved are generally not in the range of affordability for those in critical need, and are being proposed at a time when rents are already declining. 

The City of Santa Cruz has been similarly proactive, recently unveiling a proposal at their quarterly commercial real estate brokers meeting, to charge a monthly fee to owners of vacant commercial buildings as long as their building remains vacant to help fund cleanup and policing of vagrancy. While the intention is undoubtedly beneficial, its effect would be to penalize owners already suffering from the loss of cash flow, which could force them to sell under duress and thereby lose additional money. The idea was met with widespread dissent by the brokers whose clients would be impacted, and it remains to be seen whether the city will proceed with the idea.

More recently Mayor Fred Keeley and a coalition of non-profit and low-income housing developers put forth the Workforce Housing Solutions Act for a transfer tax of $96 per parcel to fund low-income housing, but with its limited annual proceeds the benefit would be minimal in terms of what it could actually fund, and there is already a high amount of low-income housing being built with all the new construction underway downtown and elsewhere. To lower the impact on working families and lower and middle-income homeowners, the local Association of Realtors has proposed instead to drop the tax to $50 per parcel, adding exemptions for seniors and raising the starting point from $1.8M to $4M, shifting the burden to the high-end segment who are better-suited to absorb such costs.

Regardless of political leanings, the good news is that most of us generally share the goal of making things better for the community we love. And if the parties on both sides recognize this common thread and keep an open mind during the process of deliberation and debating, it will improve our odds of coming up with better solutions to the real-time issues that ultimately affect us all.