To the editor:
The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners plans to hold several workshops regarding sections of the Lincoln County code regulating short-term rentals. During these workshops, the commissioners will discuss whether it is prudent to put a cap on the number of short-term rentals in the county. This discussion may be spurned, in part, by an anti-short term rental petition recently circulated by 15neighborhoods, a small anti-vacation rental advocacy group.
I am writing to add a new perspective to the discourse surrounding short-term rentals.
To begin, fair and reasonable short-term rental regulations are good for the new economy. A cap on vacation rentals is not.
In the new economy, internet-based markets enable consumers to rent out their properties when not using them. Economists refer to this as the “sharing economy.” The beauty of the sharing economy is two-fold: (1) people who cannot afford to buy an ocean-side vacation home can now rent one and enjoy an experience once limited to the high net-worth, and (2) under-used resources can be put to good use, instead of building new properties which also end up being under-used.
In addition, the vacation rental industry benefits the coastal economy in the following ways:
- The vacation rental industry employs hundreds – if not thousands – of maintenance, cleaning, and service personnel who live and work along the Oregon coast. Many of these employees earn a living wage in the industry, buy a local home, and contribute to the local economy.
- Vacation rentals draw overnight tourists to the coast. These tourists frequent local restaurants, grocery stores, gift shops, and other establishments; these tourists are the lifeblood of our local small businesses.
- Vacation rentals provide transient tax and other tax revenues which fund local government undertakings.
- During a pandemic, vacation rentals are generally safer than hotels. No-contact check-in is standard, and individuals do not share hallways, elevators, doors, ice machines, etc., with individuals outside of their group.
Some may argue that vacation rentals limit the available stock of affordable housing. But this is illogical. Oceanside vacation homes are far too expensive to serve as affordable housing. By contrast, the affordable housing community can afford a few nights away in a vacation home. For this community, renting hotel rooms and eating out each night of vacation is prohibitively expensive. A home large enough for an entire family with a kitchen to prepare meals and defray food costs falls within budget.
In conclusion, nightly rentals are both a class equalizer and resource conservation tool. Moreover, nightly rentals provide innumerable living wage jobs to those living on the coast and draw tourist dollars to support local small businesses. Capping nightly rentals will have dire consequences for vacation rental industry service workers, small businesses, local government, lower net worth vacationers, and our nation’s limited resources. There is no need to set a cap on vacation rentals.
— Aaron Linfoot, Meredith Lodging/Lincoln City
Please, be honest about the irrelevancy of your statistics. You clearly do not live here because not one of your statistics applies to unincorporated Lincoln County.
The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners is only concerned with the STRs in unincorporated Lincoln County where there are about 564, most in single-family residential areas.
These 564 STRs do not employ “hundreds–if not thousands–here.
In Lincoln County, where long-term housing availability is less than 1% and more STR Business Licenses are issued than new Construction Permits, it is unlikely that your employees can find a local home unless an STR Business Owner gives up this investment.
Although STRs do indeed draw “overnight tourists to the coasts” these tourists do not “frequent restaurants, grocery stores, gifts shops, etc” in unincorporated Lincoln County because there are few to none.
They may spend their money in the cities where they are limited to Tourist/Commercial areas, but the cities do not share this money with Unincorporated Lincoln County. Nor do they share TRT.
In unincorporated Lincoln County where the STRs that sleep an average of 8 people, transient renters around me bring cases of beer and wine, soda for kids, meat, milk, bread, peanut butter, breakfast cereal, eggs, cookies, chips and other snacks and eat in the rental.
That’s the point: A short term rental is a cheap way to eat and sleep for groups of people who are not satisfied with a small fridge, hot pot for soup/coffee/tea, and a microwave for popcorn in a motel room.
And the money made by the out-of-town business investors who own 94% of the short term rentals in unincorporated Lincoln County leaves the county. Please name one item that the STR business investors buy or pay for that a full-time resident would not? Oh, advertising. Don’t say tranient rental tax. It is deminimis in unincorporated Lincoln County.
The financial contribution of this industry to the full-time residents of unincorporated residential zones of Lincoln County is nothing.
You must think we full-time residents of Unincorporated Lincoln County are a bunch of hayseeds. Think again.
You can walk through my neighborhood at any given time to see the impact of short-term rentals — trash, poop, over occupancy and noise, just to name a few things. In my opinion something needs to be done to hold these companies accountable.
I have done my share of writing to the Lincoln County board of commissioners, homeowners assication, speaking at meetings, writing op-eds about my personal experience in my neighborhood. You can try to be the squeaky wheel to better your community, in my opinion.
However, in my neighborhood if you speak out about any of the above things you will be sued or the threat of a lawsuit will soon follow. Signs will be put on office windows to shame you, websites will have your picture on them with hyperbolic comments, they will send letters to homeowners to scare them, in my opinion.
In the end they will give you wreaths, attach them to your balcony, leave them there to rot and decay. The garbage will remain, the poop is your problem, over-occupancy and noise, parties, not an issue, they don’t live here. They are not going to have any solutions for the community only division and chaos, in my opinion.