Colorado resort towns are limiting vacation rentals as communities weather waves of tourists, a housing crisis and a labor shortage.
Short-term rental properties are under fire in the Colorado mountains as communities weather record traffic, a surge of new residents, soaring home prices and a painful shortage of workers.
“We are beaten down. Everybody is overworked. We have way too many people here and it’s not sustainable and it’s not productive,” Martha Keene, a longtime service worker in Crested Butte told her town council last week as they weighed a year-long moratorium on vacation rental property permits. “I’ve never seen this town like this. I’m not here to live next to businesses. I want a neighbor. We need a moratorium to catch our breath and formulate a real plan to save our community.”
Only a few towns in the high country are not weighing adjustments to short-term rentals right now. Here are some of the measures communities are considering:
A citizen petition in Frisco would ban short-term rental properties with non-resident owners.
Three Telluride residents last week submitted a petition for a vote in November that would slash the number of short-term rentals in town.
Steamboat Springs’ city council last month suspended new short-term rental applications for 90 days.
Crested Butte, which in 2017 capped short-term rentals at 30% of all the homes in town, this week approved a 12-month suspension of all vacation rental permits.
Breckenridge town leaders are considering a significant increase in fees for the town’s 3,800 vacation rentals.
Buena Vista’s board of trustees are weighing a plan to cap short-term rentals, which make up about 7% of the town’s housing stock. Neighboring Salida last week approved a three-month moratorium on new short-term rental permits.
Vail, which has more than 2,100 short-term rental permits, also is mulling increased regulation.
All the caps, suspensions and regulation efforts hope to slow the recent wave of investors buying properties leased long term by locals and converting them into nightly rentals for vacationers. There’s a growing sense of urgency, as local leaders watch businesses struggle to remain open when workers lose their housing and leave town.
“We are seeing our community suffer. We are seeing our business owners close their doors and struggle to keep staff. Burnout is high. Turnover is high,” said Emily Scott Robinson, a Telluride musician who joined a restaurant manager and a filmmaker in gathering 200 signatures supporting a vote on a short-term rental cap in town. “We should have done this five years ago. We need to turn back the clock a little bit.”
Telluride has about 38% of its free-market units available for rent to visitors. That’s 737 homes, up from 382 a decade ago. Robinson last week submitted 200 signatures supporting a ballot question in November asking Telluride voters to cap short-term rentals in the town at 400, with permits available through a lottery.
Robinson — along with Hayley Nenadal and Olivia Lavercombe — know that many of the homeowners who lose their short-term rental permits will not automatically convert their properties into rental housing for locals. But combined with possible financial incentives to rent to local workers, she hopes a cap can “deflate a corner of the housing market.”
Like many locals in resort communities, she can name many friends who lost their rental homes in recent months as new owners purchased properties and converted them into more lucrative short-term rentals.
“We hope that a portion of them will convert back to long-term rentals,” she said, blaming investor-owned short-term rentals for inflating housing prices beyond the reach of local workers. “Most people we approach have been enthusiastic and they feel this is a fairly moderate proposal. This is one small step toward affordable housing and creating a sustainable community.”
Hayes Walsh has spent the past few weeks knocking on doors in Frisco to gather signatures for a petition requiring short-term rental owners to live in the house. Like Robinson, he’s finding residents eager to contain short-term rentals.
“I have overwhelming support,” said Walsh, who works for a property management company. “The people who are opposing this do not live in this town.”
He’s close to gathering the 400 signatures he needs and he recently launched a website — friscopetition.com — to help grow support for the petition that asks local leaders to pass an ordinance that bans short-term rentals unless the home is the owner’s primary residence.
“Everybody here gets it,” Walsh said. “People want to live in a more tight-knit community.”
Read the full article on The Colorado Sun.
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