Want to end the housing crisis? Start by following the law

By   Hydee Feldstein Soto

You can read the original posting of this story at the original source.

In late 2019, the City of Los Angeles passed the Home Sharing Ordinance. It is a simple, straightforward law that is easily enforceable.

As reported by Better Neighbors LA, Paula lived in a close-knit community in downtown Los Angeles, until crime, trash, and riots began to plague her block. Why?

A nearby property owner decided to get into the illegal vacation rental business. Jamie faced a similar threat due to the conversion of a duplex unit into an illegal hostel while a young couple moved out of the neighborhood because they couldn’t afford the ever-increasing rents in Los Angeles. And down the street in the same neighborhood, a homeless encampment grew as the ruthless housing crisis pushed thousands of people onto the streets.

These are not separate stories, they are one story tied together by two common threads. The first, sadly, is no surprise: it is the greed of corporations that turn neighborhoods where neighbors know each other’s families into for-profit hotels where strangers come and go. Rather than building communities, short-term rentals are purely financial transactions, turning a shared commons into an extractive commodity.

But the second common thread these stories share is even more shocking: it is our own city's refusal to enforce the laws it has written and passed.

In late 2019, the City of Los Angeles passed the Home Sharing Ordinance. It is a simple, straightforward law that is easily enforceable. The ordinance allows for the short-term rental of one or more residential rooms in a homeowner’s primary residence (e.g., not in the homeowner’s second home or an entire apartment building), and absolutely prohibits short-term rentals in rent-stabilized units or affordable housing restricted by such a covenant. Such homes are critical to maintaining the housing stock available and affordable for working families in our city.

Enforcement of the existing ordinance is simple and straightforward. The city can verify the address of any unit offered for short-term rental by cross-referencing the city’s registry of rent-stabilized units with several other databases: driver’s licenses, government benefits, tax returns, or voting registration. This alone serves to verify whether the address offered for rental is in fact the owner’s primary residence and is not rent-stabilized or affordable housing.

The City can do all these things. But it chooses not to.

How do we know? Because it's as simple and straightforward as going online, browsing vacation rental listings, and finding the ordinance violations. Remember Paula and Jamie? The city's failure to help Paula and Jamie led them to Better Neighbors LA.

Better Neighbors LA has done the work the city isn't, comparing rental listings to public records to show that housing for distressed communities is being sold online to short-term tourists.

In Venice, Silver Lake, Mid-City and downtown Los Angeles, neighbors have repeatedly found illegal listings and filed complaint after complaint in an effort to move the city to enforce its own ordinance.

Los Angeles must decide what kind of city we will be and for whom we will be it.

Will we respond to the worst housing crisis in a century by selling off our affordable housing as corporate hotels? Or by preserving and protecting it?

Will we be a city that looks the other way for the right price, or one that follows the laws its public servants write and pass?

I know what my values ​​are and where I stand. And you, will you be with me?