The local laws which are at least indirectly decided by the people who live there decide whether people have a right to do business in residential areas or not.
> This category of complaint seems like a thin veneer around the core of truth that people who sink a colossal chunk of their nest egg and future earnings into one asset are knee-jerk averse to anything perceived as a threat to it.
I'm not a homeowner. I just dislike the idea of a company profiting off blatant disregard of the law. I personally don't really care about rentals, but if you want to do them then I hold the opinion you should get the laws changed to allow for them.
If anything, allowing vacation rentals would actually increase the value of homes in that area because it probably increases the rent.
While people have qualms with the effect of short term rentals on housing markets, they usually don't show up on an HOA level.
The real problem is they were being bad neighbors, not that they were short-term neighbors, and once your neighbor starts to ruin your ability to enjoy your home you have a just argument to take action.
> But outside of that structure, what gives someone the right to dictate to their neighbors what they can and can't do with their own property?
The fact that you live in close proximity to them so many of your activities can affect them, and that it's only by communal agreement that you even have "property" at all.
This is literally the core of the concept of zoning.
If you don't like it work against zoning laws, but there's generally a consensus on the broader topic here.
"But outside of that structure, what gives someone the right to dictate to their neighbors what they can and can't do with their own property?"
Zoning. Literally, most cities and towns have laws about where someone can run a hotel. A huge number of AirBNB rentals are highly illegal.
People get away with operating small businesses in residential zones because the businesses they usually operate tend to operate unnoticed and without disrupting neighbors' lives. For example, working from home as an independent contractor, or simply receiving business mail at your home address--these things have zero impact on your neighbors, generally speaking. It's quite possible to operate such a small business out of your home or apartment without any of your neighbors ever even realizing it.
Now, if you were actually engaged in providing services to customers directly from your home or apartment, that would be a different story. If you had a steady stream of clients visiting your home, your neighbors might be right to complain about the increased traffic, noise, or any other undesirable consequences.
Treating your property like a hotel is no different from treating it like a restaurant or a hair salon or a department store; it changes the character of the neighborhood, places extra (or at the very least unexpected) load on local infrastructure (which may not be designed to handle it), potentially reduces security, and causes any number of other potentially adverse side effects.
But I'd say that your argument that operating a hotel out of your home is somehow just like operating any other kind of small business falls on its face by virtue of the fact that operating a hotel out of your home is clearly quite controversial while operating many other kinds of small businesses is not. If these things were the same, this discussion would not be happening.
Because any livable set of laws recognizes that externalities are a thing and need to be addressed.
I, as a homeowner, can't start amassing a large pile of radioactive material on my property. I can't start a home-based waste incineration company, even if the structure exists entirely on my property. There's a ton of stuff I can't do, because there are laws prohibiting it.
If the laws right now don't address "you can't invite enough strangers to your house such that it causes a lot of waste or damage to your neighborhood," then that's just because we didn't have broadly accessible systems in place to invite those strangers; it doesn't mean that that's now or has ever been okay, just like collecting a pile of radioactive waste in my backyard hasn't been okay since we learned about the harms of radiation poisoning.
"Why can't people do x?" Because we live in a society.
Your rant about people not knowing better than to diversify investment is completely oblivious of the fact that most people out there have no reasonable way to do so, and that their only protection is the existence of such rules.
Yup. And they typically have something in common - they don't bother the neighbors or create an atmosphere that is noticeably different than that of a residential neighborhood without the home business.
Work from a home office? No one will notice (other than the fact that you're home a lot). Teach piano lessons? As long as your students' parents don't park in front of other houses, probably not a big deal. (But people will notice.)
Want to run a metal shop out of your garage M-F? You'll get shut down because it's a disruption. Want to do metal shop projects on the weekend? No big deal, as long as you don't start too early and bother the neighbors.
> "Renting a room" seems like the kind of small business that's ideal for this situation - it takes no more infrastructure to house a vacation rental than it does to house a longer-term resident.
It's not about the "infrastructure" (when reduced to simply "a place to stay"), but about the externalities of everything that comes with frequent turnover of for-pay visitors. A vacation rental inherently means frequent turnover of residents, whereas "renting a room" means having a long(er) term resident with much less turnover.
> Leaseholders can also throw parties and be disruptive; there is an existing legal process to deal with noise complaints.
Yup, and it's easy to do because a leaseholder, well, lives there so the law can take its course. A vacation renter is gone pretty much before you can pursue any existing legal processes apart from calling the cops to come by and tell them to turn the music down. So, the AirBnB renter doesn't have to live with much/any consequences; the AirBnB "host" doesn't necessarily have consequences since they'll say "I won't rent to them again"; but the folks in the neighborhood do suffer from it.
Perhaps the law differs where you live, but where I live, local ordnance on repeated noise complaints gradually ramps penalties up from warnings to fines, so hosts have a strong interest in preventing partying at their properties. That seems a more appropriate legislative response than banning short-term rentals entirely.
Or maybe buy in a city that makes the decision to not allow that kind of rental?
I don't see a significant difference in a step up from the association I was in where you deemed that ok, to a city making the same decision.
I was just following his logic that he felt it was ok that the associating decided and that if a city decided the same, then I don't see much difference.
Ha. Don't come in Europe cities. There _are_ regulations in cities about that. And rightly so.
AirBnB is making it easier for individual people to ignore these rules, and the to date enforcement hasn't been particularly strong.
Property rights are usually a literal appeal to authority (e.g. a community or a government).
Noise complaints are a downstream symptom. It's often unproductive and ineffective for laws to try to back-propagate policy by regulating downstream symptoms and hoping upstream symptoms get fixed as a result.
This is a really well-crafted statement that applies widely to all kinds of issues in governance.
I don't object to you running a hotel next door, but I expect your guests to behave themselves well..
Perhaps if the root issues were given some easy way for one to satisfactorily resolve when they arise then their would be far less support for outright bans.
The problem is that any law or rule is only as good as its enforcement. People forget this too often when writing regulations, ending up with rules that are too costly, or involve too much invasion of privacy to get right.
I think the lesson is that you should always consider enforcement when writing policy. It needs to be front-and-center, not a secondary concern. A worse policy may end up being better if it's more easily enforceable.
On the other hand, if they behave themselves just as well as long-term owners, then no, you really shouldn't have any say whatsoever about who lives in your neighbor's property.
We live in a society.
The fact that what you do with your own property often has direct effects on your neighbors. This is why zoning regulations exist, for example. And noise ordinances. And building codes. There isn't a magical forcefield that ends at your property line that prevents what you're doing from having an adverse affect on others.
Just like people who don't like noise should be careful about living close to other people, people who like to be left alone to do what they want with their own property need to take the same considerations into mind.
Texas has barely any zoning and it’s doing fine.
There is tons of zoning in Texas; I think you're thinking of Houston.
By joining a HOA, you've delegated away to the collective the right to dictate to your neighbors what they can and can't do with their own property. In your case, the system worked - because you are in a HOA. If people want to exert that kind of collectivist control over their neighbors, that's the kind of organization they should be buying homes in.
But outside of that structure, what gives someone the right to dictate to their neighbors what they can and can't do with their own property? All kinds of small businesses are routinely run out of residential zoned properties. "Renting a room" seems like the kind of small business that's ideal for this situation - it takes no more infrastructure to house a vacation rental than it does to house a longer-term resident. "Hotels" require employees and elevators and truckloads of supplies delivered weekly; vacation rentals have none of that, and so the comparison makes little sense beyond "they are noisy". Leaseholders can also throw parties and be disruptive; there is an existing legal process to deal with noise complaints.
This category of complaint seems like a thin veneer around the core of truth that people who sink a colossal chunk of their nest egg and future earnings into one asset are knee-jerk averse to anything perceived as a threat to it.