To: Lindsey Horvath, LA County Board of Supervisors Chair
Dear Ms. Horvath,
Shame on you for voting against us “ma and pa” Airbnb hosts! Your behavior regarding Short Term Rentals (STR) is like bringing a cannon to a fistfight. You want to take aim at the greedy, unscrupulous investors who buy up houses and apartment buildings in LA County to take advantage of STRs? Great! Punch up, not down … and don’t use a cannon!
Taking the weaponry metaphor further, we small Airbnb hosts are collateral damage, the term warmongers use for primarily females and children who are casualties of war. When I asked Airbnb about their host demographics, they said that “60% are women.” Of those, I’m betting most are over 65, as I personally know many in our area who are seniors. Also, according to Airbnb, approximately 80% of hosts in LA County share just one home. So much for the fantasy of returning housing stock by effectively shutting down Airbnb. Collateral damage, indeed.
But alas, the voices of women and children are ignored when it comes to war, specifically the well-funded wholesale “war” the hotel industry has waged upon Airbnb and similar STR platforms. Y’all be smellin’ that? It’s fishy … the smell of the hotel lobbies fishing for ways to blow us small hosts out of the water.
I walk into the yard attached to our Airbnb space and am enveloped by different scents — the perfume of lilacs, jasmine and orange trees — no fishy smell here! This yard is also for our guests’ dogs, something hotels can’t offer. It is insane to lump us little folks who depend on STRs for our livelihood with the “Big Boys.” This heavy-handed “one size fits none” plan severely limits STRs to theoretically increase housing stock, which will have the opposite effect — destroying the lives of people who depend on STRs to make ends meet and, ironically, to avoid being homeless themselves. On what planet does throwing us out of our house so others can have available housing make sense?
I know I shouldn’t be emotional in this letter. However, I am not bound by Robert’s Rules of Order: I will instead follow Roberta’s Rules and speak my heart. You want to have more housing stock available for long-term rentals? Hurrah — we’re all for it! You want to stop the abuse of non-hosted “party houses” that have made modest neighborhoods a nightmare to live in? Ditto — we wouldn’t want non-stop partying in our neighborhood, either. However, as they pertain to us on-site hosts, your regulations will not increase housing nor solve the housing problem.
I wish there were a more polite way to say, “Shame on you,” but there isn’t, so I’ll repeat it: Shame on you! Have you done any independent studies like San Bernardino County did? A recent report by San Bernardino County found no “clear and empirical data that indicates STRs have a substantial impact on the availability of long-term rental housing,” and there were no “trends pointing to STRs displacing long-term renters or serving as a primary cause of an increase in monthly rents.” There’s now a proposal being entertained by the city of LA to revisit the misleading studies proffered by coalitions of the hotel and anti-Airbnb neighborhood groups.
What we’ve done with our property in Altadena is create an aging-in-place plan that you want to rip away from us. We were so pleased and proud of ourselves when we realized we could pay for the mortgage, insurance and taxes — taxes you benefit from — with the income from our STR while also benefiting the community.
We love renting to people who are here for a short time and often travel with their dogs. We’re the perfect solution for so many who, by necessity, are “short term” people — visiting grandparents whose kids don’t have room for them, interns at Jet Propulsion Lab, visiting professors at CalTech, Huntington Library Scholars, people who are moving here and want to “sample” neighborhoods without having to cough up huge amounts for a first and last, plus a security deposit. We’ve hosted artists and teachers from Croatia, Brazil and Israel, and provided a safe haven for travel nurses during the lockdown when no one else would. Staying in traditional hotels for these folks would have been prohibitive or impossible; your ill-conceived regulations would also hurt them!
The hotel industry is getting revenge on Airbnb for daring to compete with them while trying to compensate for the decline in hotel stays during COVID-19. We are low-hanging fruit and don’t have the resources to pay for studies like hotels have, including the apparently hotel-bought and paid for McGill Professor David Wachsmuth, the well-funded “Better Neighbors” coalition and hotel-funded union members that turned out in droves to the Board of Supervisors meeting in February. Surely you know that single women and widows don’t have these kinds of organizational resources?
Lindsey, why would you side with the hotel lobby and blithely help chip away at an ever-shrinking middle class? I never took you for being a Stage IV cancerous capitalist. How dare you throw us little folks under the financial bus so casually and without any conscience? Shame on you.
Sincerely,
Ellen Snortland
