Between Dec. 10 and Jan. 13, Gov. Gavin Newsom placed Lake Tahoe and the greater Sacramento region under a regional stay-at-home order that told people to postpone trips and stay home. The order interrupted one of Tahoe’s busiest seasons of the year, but of course, it didn’t stop people from coming for a ski trip over the winter holidays.
Placer County's code compliance department received 350 calls and emails during the most recent order, said Jayme Paine, a supervising officer in the department. Some of those were from visitors who had questions about traveling to Tahoe or property owners reaching out to learn more about whether they could still rent their house. But many of those complaints came from Tahoe residents frustrated that the Airbnb or Vrbo on their street was still occupied when they were supposed to be empty.
“I have a place next door to me that is rented every single day,” says Cheri Sugal, a resident of North Lake Tahoe. “It has never stopped.”
Sugal can see her neighbor’s house from her window. One group leaves. Then a cleaning company arrives to prepare for the next group. She says the turnover often happens on the same day, even within hours. She’s counted how many groups have arrived since the order was put in place.
“We’re on rental number 11,” Sugal told SFGATE. She’s called multiple times to Placer County’s COVID-19 hotline to report the house. The sheriff said officers were not going to enforce the order and county officials emphasized education over enforcement. “Every single time, I’m requesting a callback: 'Please let me know what the follow-up is going to be with this.' I never get a callback. Nothing happens. They just ignore it completely.”
On vacation rental site Airbnb, before you can book a reservation, the website asks visitors to self-report that their stay is permitted under the state's travel restrictions. All you have to do is check a box to confirm that you have checked local restrictions and rules. This checkbox is a screening tool that homeowners can use to show the reservations they've accepted are valid.
Now that Tahoe is in the purple tier, restrictions have eased up somewhat. State health officials still say to avoid traveling more than 120 miles from your permanent residence.
“Public health is our priority,” a spokesperson from Airbnb said in an emailed statement to SFGATE. “We continue to provide hosts and guests information on local health orders to help keep communities safe. We want to be good partners to state and local officials and have also introduced new measures that ask guests to confirm they have checked local rules and restrictions before confirming eligibility and completing a booking.”
At the height of the winter holidays, Placer County Supervisor Cindy Gustafson sent a letter to Airbnb and Vrbo, another vacation rental site, asking the companies to take a stronger position and inform homeowners about the shutdown.
“We knew that we didn’t have the tools or the number of people to be able to enforce 3,500 short-term rentals in our community,” Gustafson says. “We felt strongly that they should be helping us educate and inform their owners. If the message came not only from us but also from the platforms that they may be able to assist us as well.”
Gustafson says she was surprised by how quickly the platforms responded with their own messaging about the stay-at-home order. Airbnb also blocked any new bookings in Tahoe for three nights, between Dec. 28 and Jan. 1. Guests who had previously booked reservations during those days were not impacted.
For residents like Sugal, the education and enforcement efforts of Placer County and the vacation rental platforms didn’t go nearly far enough.
"I have asked them time and time again, 'Why? Why are you not willing to discourage people from coming here when their lives are at risk? When people’s lives are at risk?'" Sugal said.
The proliferation of vacation rentals in Lake Tahoe and their impact on the community is not a new issue, nor is the issue specific to Tahoe. Homes for vacationers have been a mainstay in Tahoe since the early 20th century. And Tahoe’s economy is undeniably built on tourism.
But like a lot of things, platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo, plus a pandemic, have elevated the urgency around short-term rentals to new heights — especially when local residents see an old time A-frame down the street get renovated, listed and rented day in, day out, for months on end.
“You see this consistent revolving door of people coming in and out of your neighborhood,” Sugal says. “It’s scary. I have a lot of neighbors who are very old and very vulnerable. It creates a whole other layer to this pandemic that the threat is coming to their front door.”
Across the Tahoe Basin and in Truckee, vocal criticism about short-term rentals and Airbnb has been a constant for months, if not years. Their impact has long been felt in Tahoe, where already limited and expensive housing for locals is evaporating and converting into lodging for tourists. Grievances around short-term rentals levied by locals are getting louder. It’s easy to lay blame when all you have to do is log onto the website to see pages and pages of cabins and chalets that are booked solid for months.
In Truckee, a 2019 housing inventory revealed more than 1,700 short-term rentals. In North Tahoe, almost 3,500 houses and condos are vacation rentals. A lot of people point to short-term rentals as one of the biggest drivers in the housing crisis.
A 1963 two-bedroom was remodeled into a Pinterest-perfect dream getaway for $400 a night. But good luck renting it. It’s booked until May. A teensy two-bedroom bungalow is booked every weekend — except for a few mid-week dates — between now and April. One four-bedroom “dazzling chalet” requires a 60-night minimum to book. Considering the pandemic, that sounds reasonable — until you see the $17,000-plus price tag.
Are there really that many essential workers heading up to Tahoe for the winter? Or maybe these renters are quarantining. Homeowners could have also blocked off the dates to follow the rules — or use their vacation rental themselves.
“My personal feeling, and you’re welcome to publish this: Short-term rentals are a cancer to any town similar to ours and probably to any city,” said Court Leve, a professional photographer and Truckee resident.
“I can’t start a restaurant in my garage. I’d be shut down in 24 hours,” Leve says. “But you can have essentially a hotel anywhere you want. It doesn’t make sense. Again, that comes down to money.”
Placer County and other local jurisdictions collect Transient Occupancy Taxes off vacation rentals, like they do off any lodging property or hotel.
Last spring, during the first shutdown order, Sugal says she collected 3,500 signatures on a petition to ban vacation rentals in Tahoe.
In March, Placer County’s health officer urged short-term rentals to cease operations. At first, the order worked. Only 3% of short-term rentals were occupied the first week of April. Granted, spring is historically a slow time of year in Tahoe — and the pause didn’t last very long.
As soon as Tahoe reopened, the area has experienced sky-high volumes of people at a pace that simply hasn’t stopped. The issues that have spiraled are many: trash, traffic. Yet, according to Payne, there are only a handful of houses in North Lake Tahoe that receive repeated complaints.
"It's important to realize that a complaint does not directly correlate to a violation," Payne said. "Any person is able to call and make a complaint."
Most of the jurisdictions in Tahoe have some sort of regulation in place to rein in short-term rentals. In Placer County, homeowners need a permit to list their house, part of a new ordinance that launched in January 2020 to implement accountability for nuisance issues. The permit limits the number of people who can stay in a house, depending on its size. But it stops short of limiting the number of short-term rentals in the area.
Gustafson says the permitting program barely started running when it was overloaded by the governor’s stay-at-home order. Suddenly the county was tasked with enforcing not just nuisance issues, but the occupancy of these houses entirely. The county can regulate noise, trash and parking, Gustafson said, but they can’t regulate how homeowners decide to use their house.
Last spring, attempts to enforce the ban were largely ineffective, Gustafson says. County officers would respond to complaints of vacation homes that were occupied, but most of the time, the people at the house said they were the homeowners or relatives of the homeowners.
“We don’t have a right to tell people that they can’t use their home,” Gustafson said.
Payne says the county's compliance hotline continues to receive more than two dozen calls a week, in general. If a violation is issued, a local contact listed with the property has 60 minutes to respond and resolve the situation before enforcement is called in. If no one responds, then an enforcement officer can write a citation.
Placer County’s permit system isn’t perfect, Gustafson says. She’s open to taking more action to rein in the problems affiliated with short-term rentals, but she wants to see how the system works when there’s not a pandemic exacerbating the issue.
“I know people are upset about short-term rentals. What I’m not sure is, are they going to be upset after the pandemic is over?” Gustafson said.
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