The Sonder exception is still in the rules

The City Planning Commission is going to meet at 1:30 on Tuesday to work on Short Term Rentals again. They'll be working with a set of recommendations dutifully put forward by their poor pitiable staff who have been asked to do this several times now.   Well, here they go again. 

The rules proposed by the staff of the City Planning Commission would keep the heart of the City Council’s plan: a requirement that short-term rentals be allowed in residential areas only if the owner lives on the site. But the planners recommend allowing only one entire unit per property to be rented out at residentially zoned properties, while council members had envisioned allowing up to three.

Yeah well that is good and all but when this gets kicked up to Council, they're likely to shift it back.  Still it's encouraging to find that somebody still thinks 1 STR per homestead exemption is good policy. Pity they only think that's good enough for strictly residential zones, though.  The rules get slightly looser for mixed use and entirely too loose in commercial zones. We've talked as nauseum about the problems with this so we won't get too boring about it now.

I did want to point out that Jason Williams's gift to Sonder and Motwani is still very much intact, though.

Larger-scale operations would be allowed in commercial areas. A homestead exemption would not be required on those properties, but the staff's recommendations would prohibit most properties from using more than a quarter of their units as short-term rentals, with some exceptions such as for portions of Canal Street and Bourbon Street.

Anyway, this is far from the last stop for this business.  If you've got comments about tomorrow's CPC meeting, you might as well copy your councilmember on that too.