Is the concept supposed to be, "smart" apartments, I guess?
The apartment complex, the MidCity iLofts, is billed on its website
as a "luxury complex" with perks such as bocce ball courts, stainless
steel appliances and built-in Dolby 8.1 surround sound speakers, all
priced to attract young professionals.
But now the apartment complex has become something different: It's basically a hotel.
It's zoned mixed use so our crappy ordinance allows for unlimited short term rentals there. What's fun about that is
some entities do get long-term leases. Notice the developer's tricky way of describing a deal to rent his building to this hotel operator.
City records indicate MidCity iLofts, owned by Bruno Inc., has leased
apartments to Sonder Inc., a San Francisco-based company operating more
than 100 short term rental properties around New Orleans through sites
like Airbnb.com and HomeAway.com. Its website notes it also operates in
nine other cities.
Joshua Bruno of Bruno Inc. described his company's lease with Sonder
as "multi-year," but did not offer specifics, nor did he directly
address whether his company has deals with Sonder for other properties.
"It's great for the city, and it works for the city," said Bruno,
who characterized the renters taking advantage of Sonder-managed
properties at MidCity iLofts as corporate, "longer term rentals" with
contracts for "one year, two years."
See, it's one big "long term" tenant.
Sonder is an out of town tourism-speculator using STR platforms to leverage distressed urban housing markets to its advantage. To do this they need to partner with
dishonest property developers like Bruno. They never seem to be in short supply. Of course they also need local elected persons to enable the dishonest developers by treating them as legitimate parties whose interests need to be "balanced" against
the housing stressed people of the city they're taking advantage of.
Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell, as councilwoman, originally proposed
changing the commercial short-term rental designations in mixed-use
zoning districts. Mason Harrison, a spokesman for her transition team,
said she "is currently working to strike the right balance on this
issue."
I'm sure they'll work out a nice both-sidesy deal that preserves all the investors' profits. This is gonna be a fun couple of years.
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