Just waiting until it all blows over

One thing to emphasize immediately here is that the thing that is "one step closer" to approval is just a temporary wait-and-see maneuver.

The city’s freeze on the most popular type of short term rental license got one step closer to being codified in municipal law on Thursday.

The city council unanimously voted to accept the recommendations of the City Planning Commission, which endorsed the temporary ban in July.

There is only one more council vote standing in the way of the moratorium’s formal establishment in city law. That vote must take place within the next 90 days, at which point Mayor LaToya Cantrell will be forced to weigh in by either signing the amendment into law or vetoing it.

Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer said the vote would take place “in a few city council meetings.

Four months into the nine month freeze and it's very near to becoming officially a freeze. As we pointed out in May that freeze itself looked like a delay tactic meant to move the STR question as far away as possible from an election where it was an issue on everybody's mind.  In July we noted that the momentum for Council to act on behalf of renters instead of landlords was already fading.  Last month the planning commission pushed back the timeline on its much anticipated "study" at least a few more weeks.  The longer the process drags on and the more settled the new councilmembers are the more responsive they become to commercial and real estate interests they hear from every day relative to the voters they're only accountable to once every four years.

In the meantime, the lobbyists pushing to expand STRs in the city have written up their own policy proposals, and embarked on a series of barnstorming promotional townhalls. This week we saw a proposal filed to build this wholly commercial STR development on Magazine Street. The somehow controversial "freeze" didn't prohibit that.  

But the mayor won't even commit to the ineffectual moratorium. And, really, she hasn't said much of anything on the issue at all since she helped kick off the delay process by asking for the study in the first place. 

Since her inauguration, Cantrell — who pushed for a study on the effects of short-term rentals toward the end of her time as a council member — has mostly remained quiet on the council’s moves to restrict the short-term rental market. Cantrell’s Communication Director Beau Tidwell said that she had no comment on Thursday’s vote.

Like everyone else charged with protecting housing cost burdened New Orleanians from profit seeking real estate vampires, it looks as though she'd prefer to just wait around for the political moment to blow over.