PR blitz for STRs wins over District E councilperson
4th September 2018 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
While the issue of short-term home rentals has embroiled several parts of New Orleans and the surrounding area in often-heated discussion, New Orleans East has largely escaped the controversy. Although about 4,300 short-term rental businesses are licensed in the city, only 78 are located in the East.
However, that doesn’t mean New Orleans East will avoid the contentious debate forever, and District E City Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen and her constituents are trying to stay ahead of the curve and prepare for the future.
“It hasn’t impacted [District E] like in all the other districts,” Nguyen said. “But I’ve been meeting with the community to develop a better program for short-term rentals and see if people in the district would accept short-term rentals.”
District E includes all of New Orleans East, and Nguyen said she has been meeting with residents and business owners in districts like Venetian Isles, Lake Catherine, Lake Bullard and Michoud to gather constituents’ opinions about short-term rentals, which involve homeowners offering rooms or houses for tourists and other visitors to rent while they’re in town.
Nguyen said those meetings and town halls have reflected residents’ general aversion to short-term rentals in New Orleans East, but she also said there’s a need to allow homeowners and small-business entrepreneurs to exercise their options for increasing their own financial security.
Nguyen noted that many residents don’t work full-time or, if they do, they don’t make a livable wage without supplementing their incomes. She said short-term rentals can give those financially struggling residents an opportunity to make ends meet.
For that reason, she said, it makes sense to not completely ban short-term rentals or drastically limit them, but to find a middle ground that regulates a reasonable number of such businesses. She said such a plan would prevent a troublesome over-saturation of short-term rentals – such as whole blocks or stretches of streets dominated by such properties – while also preserving small-scale entrepreneurial efforts that enrich the local economy.
“I believe that we need a program that creates opportunities for residents to invest in the city and get income to support themselves,” Nguyen said.
A recent study by the University of New Orleans revealed that visitors to the city spent almost $150 million on short-term rentals for their stays in 2017 and overall pumped a whopping $900 million into the local economy while they were in town. That represents a five-fold increase from 2013.
The study also found that, in 2017, local residents earned more than $263 million in revenue by booking short-term rentals at their property. In addition, more than 10,000 new jobs were created by short-term rentals.
The city responded to the massive blossoming of the STR economy – and the resulting controversy over such rentals’ proper place and role in residential neighborhoods – by implementing, in May, a temporary ban on issuing additional licenses for short-term rentals while city leaders and officials investigate their options for a longview plan for short-term rentals. The city Planning Commission will issue a comprehensive report on the effects of short-term rentals in New Orleans, a development that could lead to much stricter rules and laws for regulating the controversial housing rental opportunities.
In the wake of the temporary ban – as well as an overall signaling by city officials of a desire to limit STRs – many short-term rental platforms and advocacy groups have expressed concern that tighter regulations could cripple their businesses.
As a result, such STR platforms have launched a public-relations blitz aimed at soothing residents’ fears of community disruption – such as excessive noise, an increase in littering and garbage, and public overindulgence in alcohol and other intoxicants – that can be caused by short-term rentals.
One of those programs, HomeAway, earlier this month released a proposal for comprehensive STR regulations that, according to a HomeAway director of policy communications Philip Minardi, hopefully will serve as a compromise between short-term rental critics and small-businesses owners.
“Our wholehearted hope is that our proposal brings people to the table,” Minardi told The Louisiana Weekly. “Hopefully we can find a way that works for people in the city.”
Minardi said HomeAway drafted its proposed STR roadmap after meeting with hundreds of short-term rental homeowners and managers; housing affordability advocates, city officials and residents and neighborhood leaders. Past experiences with the short-term rentals debate in New Orleans and elsewhere also factored into the HomeAway plan, according to a press release.
HomeAway dubbed its proposed regulatory framework, “Whole-Home, Whole Community,” and it has been backed by support from the local pace-setting VR industry association, the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity (ANP).
“HomeAway believes that effective short-term rental policies are achieved through compromise and collaboration, not with bans or onerous restrictions,” states the proposal.
It said HomeAway has gathered opinions from all players in the controversy in order to “hear their concerns and better understand what community members feel a fair compromise could look like. “We believe the following plan could inform a comprehensive and enforceable policy that works for all,” the report adds. “HomeAway remains committed to an open dialogue with community members in the weeks and months ahead.”
Minardi told The Louisiana Weekly that the HomeAway framework includes New Orleans East in its overall scope and that the STR platform worked to collect the ideas and feelings of those in the area.
“Obviously, New Orleans East is an important part of the city,” he said, noting that the neighborhood stretches into Lake Pontchartrain. “Our hope is to bring in anyone involved [with the debate], and that includes New Orleans East.”
New Orleans East perhaps offers a different type of challenge in terms of short-term rental policy. In addition to being one of the city neighborhoods that are the most far-flung from traditional tourist centers like the French Quarter, Uptown and the Lower Garden District, New Orleans East presents a unique melange of cultures and ethnicities that includes whites, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.
One of the entities encompassing much of the area in question is the East New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission. ENONAC President Sylvia Scineaux-Richard said many residents stand firmly against the proliferation of short-term rentals in their neighborhoods.
“Since New Orleans East is primarily residential subdivisions and a very close-knit community, most residents are not in favor of short-term rentals on a community-wide basis,” Richard said. “We believe it affects the community negatively.”
District E Councilwoman Nguyen has in the past broken from many of her peers on the City Council, several of whom have expressed a desire to strictly cap, limit and regulate short-term rentals in the city. Nguyen has conveyed a concern that draconian laws and policies involving such rentals might stifle property owners’ ability to create and grow small businesses that improve their own financial stability as well as pump much-needed investment into the local economy.
“New Orleans needs to change the way it does business to create ways for the little guys [small businesses] to invest and make money,” she said.
This article originally published in the August 27, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
