In the endgame now?

At City Hall this morning they're getting set for what is likely the penultimate council hearing on short term rental regulations.  At least for this phase. The franchise can always be rebooted and probably will. There will be plenty of loose ends to pick up on;  lawsuits, enforcement issues, spot-zoning creep, it's all baked into the set of rules currently on the table.

The current chapter has been a long time in development. To get a sense of it,  I tried to find the earliest mention of Airbnb on the Yellow Blog.  That's not a perfect barometer, especially now that I've gotten so lax about my note taking. I've been writing about gentrification on this blog since before Katrina.  Anyway, here's a post from 2013 that mentions Airbnb in San Francisco. But that was really just a link to a story about the "sharing economy" in general.  The oldest post here about New Orleans that I specifically tagged "Airbnb" was this one from 2014. 

The point is, it's been a long time coming to get us to this point where our electeds might start taking substantive action to rein the problem in.  Kristin Palmer is pleased with the work "some of" them have done.

”I’ve been pleased with the attention to the different aspects of short-term rentals and how engaged some of the council members have been,” said Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer, who has led the charge on the issue since taking office last year. “A lot of the stuff that’s coming out now is actually more restrictive than what we originally envisioned.”

And, as we said at the top, this isn't quite the last episode.  Today is about revising and approving the Planning Commission's recommendations. They still have to come back in a few months to pass an ordinance.  A copy of today's proposed amendments is attached to this NOLA.com article. Mostly these deal with tweaks to what is and isn't allowed in residential zones and whether or not those rules can be overridden by city council through conditional use permission.  It looks like they're leaving the question of affordable housing set asides in larger commercial developments for later.

Further complicating matters is Jimmy Harris's HB 43, up for consideration in a State Senate committee today, coincidentally.  This is the part of the tourism Grand Bargain that imposes a new 6.75% sales tax on STRs in New Orleans and gives a portion of the revenue to Sewerage and Water Board. Why not all?  A quarter of it goes to New Orleans and Co. for some reason. It's an indication of what a rotten deal LaToya has struck with the tourism cabal. But that's a subject for another post.  The problematic nature of tying vital infrastructure funding to the success of an industry that displaces residents should be obvious. The pro-STR lobby is already trying to exploit that, in fact. According to Palmer, that isn't going to fly. But time will tell.

The architect of the proposed regulations, Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer, was critical of the letter, describing it as a “weak attempt to try to split the (Cantrell) administration and the council and make STRs a wedge." But she acknowledged the legislation is going to cause issues with raising more money for affordable housing.

The mayor, meanwhile, remains curiously on the sideline. As a councilperson her record on this issue has been neutral-to-not very good.  At some point she's going to have to weigh in. 

In the meantime, stage lights are going up at City Council. Enjoy the show today.