Effortless living

Pretty much the definition of nice things for rich people. 

The short-term rental company Sonder -- now the largest single operator of vacation rentals in the city -- has master leased 111 apartments in the renovated Jung Hotel building. The deal with hotel developer Joe Jaeger's MCC Group, the terms of which were not disclosed, closed in early September.

Jaeger retains control of the hotel's operations, and Sonder is handling the advertising and operations of the 110 high-end luxury units, which were listed on Apartments.com at one point for between $3,900 and $5,900 per month. None of those units were ever leased, so Sonder approached MCC Group with a bid to master lease the units and rent them out on short-term rental platforms.

Jaeger "is a visionary and he had this forward-thinking idea to have effortless living -- you could lease an apartment and have access to housekeeping, they'd stock your fridge," said Peter Bowen, general manager of Sonder New Orleans. "They just couldn't lease any of them up."

Sonder is talking about this arrangement as though it were something completely new. But timeshare/hotel developments have been around for a long long time.  It's not something anybody needs to celebrate, though, unless they're Joe Jaeger or Mike Motwani or whichever of the permanent New Orleans Oligarchy happens to be making a new bundle of money from it.

It does call into further question our chances of clamping down on commercial short term rentals, though.  

The New Orleans City Council is moving toward restricting short-term rentals to commercially zoned areas after about 18 months of allowing "temporary" licenses in residential zones. Sonder doesn't object to those regulations, but it's staunchly opposed to a proposal that would limit short-term rentals in commercial multifamily buildings to 25 percent.

"Each deal is unique, and a 25 percent cap can hamper and slow developers," Bowen said.

Hey look at that, we guessed right about this last week.  Anyway, here we are yet again looking at a situation where the same old developers and landlords conspire with the same old useless politicians (Jason Williams) to continue driving poor people out of New Orleans.  It's almost effortless the way that happens.