Still pretty far from getting it right

This could be the week we get a ruling on the latest legal challenge to the latest attempt by City Council to rein in the plague of short term rentals on our city where nobody actually lives. We keep saying the only remedy for this is a full ban on these in our neighborhoods. When we say that we mean a full ban on the residentially zoned AND commercially zoned parts of the neighborhoods.  Which means we've got a long way to go with all of this. But it does like we're about to get one step closer. 

In September, U.S. District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle suspended the city’s regulatory system governing STRs. As a result, there are essentially no rules governing the industry while the city awaits Lemelle’s decision on a suit filed by the industry in May. Although the judge hasn't explicitly said which way he's leaning, his suspension of the rules, apparent skepticism of the compromise and a lack of movement on the issue since then has opponents of the industry increasingly convinced he'll strike them down. Lemelle is expected to make a decision during a Nov. 2 hearing.

I don't care for the way John Stanton frames things in that article. In lines like this one, he buys into a bullshit myth that the app-i-fied STR business is merely a noble purpose corrupted. 

What originally started as a gig economy style way to temporarily rent out a spare bedroom has turned into a multi-billion-dollar, global industry dominated by large corporations.

He also goes heavy into flourishes about the aesthetic consequences of STRs, "predatory packs of bachelor and bachelorette parties," and so on. And while that's unpleasant, it's just a symptom of the more fundamental illness. A community is being destroyed for the benefit of capital. 

This "gig economy" Stanton seems neutral about is just a new name for an old process. STRs, rideshares, delivery apps, all of these arbitrage businesses that turn workers into independent contractors or demand that people commodify their private living space just to get by, all of this is just the same logical progression of unfettered capitalism we've always seen. The alienated subjects of this regime have always been vulnerable to more intrusive and efficient extraction of value from their time, their bodies, their privacy. The "innovative technology" here is really just a means of circumventing existing rules protecting us from these intrusions.  This is why we've always needed to band together and work out ways to protect ourselves. That's democracy.  And so we need new rules to keep the beast in check.  Hopefully we can still get there.

Or maybe we won't.  Democracy is hard to accomplish but easy to subvert.  It often comes down to identifying the most venal or willfully ignorant political power brokers and buying them off; sometimes with bribes, but also with bullshit if they're stupid enough. 

The one major exception is sales tax collections, which have been below projections in the second half of this year. Cantrell’s budget anticipates a slight decrease in sales tax collections, about $3 million, next year from what was budgeted this year. During her speech, Cantrell appeared to blame the shortfall, in part, on the council’s attempts to rein in short-term rentals, on which the city collects taxes. Cantrell has repeatedly expressed frustration with recent council-backed restrictions on the industry, saying in September that she felt the city’s original short-term rental law — passed in 2016 and criticized as being too lax — “got it right.”

From the looks of things we're still years away from getting it right. Maybe by that time there will still be some city left to save. But it's slipping away fast.