Which side are you on?

Kristin Palmer

Four months after she defeated incumbent Nadine Ramsey in a brutal New Orleans City Council District C election that included issues such as short-term rentals, Kristin Gisleson Palmer made a surprising move.

She quietly applied for and received a short-term rental license. Palmer would later withdraw it, realizing that it was extremely likely she would have to vote on short-term rental regulations. That came true last month when it was Palmer's own legislation -- a sweeping ban on whole-house rentals in residential areas -- that is threatening to permanently change the short-term rental game in New Orleans.

 Four months after an election when she and others elected to this council supposedly rode in on a strong anti-STR mandate.  It was an especially critical issue in Palmer's district. She herself made an issue out of Airbnb contributions to her opponent's campaign.  Turning right around and putting her own property up to tourists seems a strange decision.

The T-P story does its best to explain it away, though. We are asked to sympathize with the Gisleson clan and the difficulties with having so much family money tied up in speculative real estate.

Palmer's own brief journey with owning a licensed short-term rental began in Algiers, where she lives and operates a business renovating and selling historic houses. The home for which she obtained an STR permit, a 3,400-square-foot house on Brooklyn Street, had long been a dream of Palmer's to renovate. She finally acquired it for $129,000 in 2016.

To help with the financing, she brought on her brother, Pittsburgh attorney John Gisleson, as a partner. As the renovation took shape, an early potential buyer saw the property as an investment opportunity, Palmer said, and planned to turn the house into a short-term rental. But that didn't feel right to Palmer, who said she turned down the initial offer.

The property sat without any serious offers for about six months. The costs of owning an empty home -- insurance, taxes, utilities -- began to weigh on Palmer, she said. She felt badly that her brother was helping pay those costs without seeing a return on an investment, so in January she began the process of applying for a short-term rental. The license was issued on Feb. 9, but Palmer said she withdrew it two days later upon recognizing the potential for conflict. She had yet to host guests there.

It doesn't say exactly why Palmer didn't "feel right" about the buyer seeing an "investment opportunity" in a property her professional flipping concern was clearly trying to turn a profit on. Besides, her brother needed a return on his investment. That must have felt okay.  But Kristin was elected as an ostensible anti-STR candidate so she's gotta play the role for a little while. At least until all this blows over which will probably happen right around the time her IZD delaying tactic expires. 

In the meantime Kristin hopes she hasn't hurt too many feelings in the landlord community.  She understands what they're going through. It's important for her to say that.

"I started looking within and at my family dynamic and all the things that happened, and I realized that this is a microcosm of what's happening citywide," Palmer said in a recent interview. "I want people to know that I see the benefits, and I can see how they help developers and homeowners and neighborhoods if they're done right."