Buying a home for your family in the desert is harder than it is in most places. In addition to making sure that the biggest investment you will make is in a good neighborhood with good schools and fits into your price range, you also have to make sure that you won’t spend every moment you spend at home playing hotel front desk clerk because the other homes in your neighborhood are actually little hotels filled with loudass parties every night with barely any oversight. Local cities, desperate to get their hands on that TOT money from these mini-hotels so they can ridiculously overpay their staff, have been reluctant to pass any sort of rules for short-term rentals and, in the case of La Quinta, even when they do say they have passed regulations – it’s really all just for show.
Let’s go through the new rules (via Desert Sun – emphasis by me):
The city will now bill short-term vacation rental owners for inspections. The cost of an inspection is $106 per hour, but Meredith said the city rarely is tasked with doing an inspection. Owners will be charged for not just the physical inspection, but the time it takes to search property records beforehand and to write-up reports afterwards.
“The only time we do an inspection, really, is if there is a discrepancy on the application,” Kevin Meredith, La Quinta code compliance supervisor, said. “If someone lists they have four to five bedrooms (on a rental website), but their building records say they only have three bedrooms, then we will go out and see if that extra bedroom is a den or if they did a bedroom conversion without a proper permit.”
Okay. Sure. This seems fine. But, is anyone at the city going to pore over Airbnb to find discrepancies between the listing and the application? I highly doubt that. Why pass a rule if it’s not going to be enforced?
Parking rules now require at least one on-site parking space for every four occupants and not more than two street parking spots may count toward the on-site parking requirement. However, Meredith said his team will not be spending their limited hours patrolling streets to count cars on the streets. He said the parking language will mostly just be a tool to allow code officers to use when they receive nuisance reports related to parking.
The code compliance officers have such limited time, they can’t patrol looking for something as easy to spot as 10 cars parked at one house. Looks like patrolling the neighborhood once again falls to Joe Homeowner and not officials from the city they live in.
The number of occupants is based on the number of bedrooms and residents may not rent out non-permanent structures such as tents, trailers and other mobile units. Meredith said during the April 2018 festival season, city staff realized they did not have a good ordinance to address residents who were renting tents in their backyard to Coachella and Stagecoach attendants looking for reasonably-priced accommodations. While this has only occurred during festival season, Meredith said the city wanted to have the power to prevent it from occurring in the future.
This one makes sense – and yes, we now live in a world where there have to be rules put into place to stop people from renting out a dozen tents in their backyard to hipsters in for the weekend.
Owners now have three strikes before their short-term rental license will be revoked. However, short-term rental owners won’t get an immediate strike, but will be given 45 minutes to remedy a violation before receiving a strike. If the short-term rental owner or the designated contact for that particular short-term rental doesn’t respond or fails to contact guests and remedy the complaint, a strike will be given.
A strike is only a strike if it’s a strike. This seems as though the city wants to look tough by proclaiming they have a “3 Strike Rule” only to never actually issue a strike to anyone.
Imagine being a guest in a hotel room, calling down to the front desk at 3 am, and being told the people in the room next to you have 45 minutes to keep the party going before quieting down and that there won’t be any consequences. You would be furious. And this isn’t a hotel, this is your home.
The city has the power to limit the number of short-term rental units in each neighborhood, but has not yet exercised that power. Amid the research the city has conducted about the 1,336 short-term rentals in La Quinta, staff found that there was one neighborhood that had a slew of short-term rentals in a row, with one single-family residential home sandwiched between.
While this hasn’t yet led to a slew of problems that code officers have had to address yet, city officials want to have the power to limit the number of short-term rental units in certain neighborhoods if it becomes a problem in the future.
In other words, the city isn’t doing anything about short-term rental clusters now and never will…but, they could if they wanted. They just don’t want to.
Thanks for caring, La Quinta.
