Wave of Bend vacation rentals swamps city council

Rarely does a big decision on a big issue before the Bend City Council become something of an anti-climactic footnote.

But it was only after several hours of emotional testimony and debate on another big issue – a surge in vacation rental homes that some residents said were destroying their neighborhoods — that councilors agreed 7-0 without debate late Wednesday night to hear an appeal of the OSU-Cascades Westside campus approval.

There’s a long history to the campus debate and rigid timetable laid out under state land-use law for the appeal filed by the Truth in Site coalition, which the council will hear at noon on Monday, Sept. 29 th at City Hall. At this stage in the process, they couldn’t say much — and they also were getting tired.

The vacation rental issue was fairly new and put a glaring spotlight on a far less clear set of issues, primarily the allowed loopholes or enforcement problems that have allowed the number of short-term rental homes in the city to surge from 100 or so a few years ago to close to 500 now — and in some Old Town-area neighborhoods, residents are literally surrounded by them.

But that wasn’t the only passionate testimony of the night – for a second straight meeting, several disabled residents and their representative chastised the city for not doing enough to remove barriers to access.

In the wake of the U.S. Department of Justice decision to close its enforcement of a decade-old lawsuit settlement, the critics of Bend’s ADA efforts this time submitted a request to remove 150 top-priority barriers to access around the city. Councilors asked that some specifics mentioned by a blind speaker be addressed, but there was no other immediate feedback.

The meeting room was packed with an overflow crowd of close to 70 people, most on hand to talk about the fast-rising number of homes being turned into lucrative vacation rentals and neighbors’ plea to save their neighborhoods from becoming, in essence, commercial zones.

The city of Bend has studied the complaints from residents of traffic, parking, noise and other issues and councilors heard the report before many residents pleaded for a moratorium or cap on the number or density of vacation rentals.

The study looked at “where they are, how many are there, and do those houses have an extra high number of police calls associated with them,” city Community Relations Manager Anne Aurand said earlier Wednesday.

“It’s not necessary a code violation or a police call, it’s just not a neighborhood feel any more,” Aurand said.

Vacation rentals can be viewed by vacationers as an ideal way to experience a city.

“In the recent months, we’ve seen a ton of vacation rentals pop up and around,” Aurand said.

During a council work session, Visit Bend CEO Doug LaPlaca said about 10 percent of lodging units in the city are rental homes, calling it an “integral part” of the tourism industry, and urged caution in adopting any new regulations.

He noted a “summer lodging shortage” during the literally hot season in Bend, when room-tax revenues were up on the order of 24 percent from a year ago. The weekend of the Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews Band concerts, referrals were being made not just to Sunriver, Sisters or Redmond, but Madras as well.)

City Business Advocate Carolyn Eagan said Bend has 366 identified vacation rental properties, but over 100 were found to not have proper city planning approval, a stack they are working through to resolve issues, even as dozens more apply for approval.

And 41 percent of them are in the River West Neighborhood Association.

Eagan laid out some options for the council to consider, one a clean-up of city code to “help us do a better job responding to neighbor and industry concerns about these properties.” But whether they might need a city business license, and where that line would be drawn, could be “opening up a pretty big can of worms,” such as long-term vs. short-term rentals, said city Councilor Mark Capell.

Other cities around the state and elsewhere have put caps or limits on the number of vacation rentals. But city officials warned that there would need to be some caution about a suspension of allowing such rentals, as property rights issues — and lawsuits — might arise.

NW Albany Avenue resident Ian Morris was the first of many to bemoan a “pretty alarming transition” taking place in his neighborhood, and not just summer noise and traffic.

During the spring and fall “shoulder seasons,” he said their blow is “a ghost town, dark — on Halloween, kids don’t even come by.”

“The guests we interact with are nice enough,” he said. “The problem is, there’s constant strangers. The problem is so insidious — it cleanly and politely robs our neighborhood of its character.”

“They are kept up nice,” he said, “but we don’t want to live in the nicest-looking non-neighborhood in town.” And he said he doesn’t care about property values rising if it means living in a “shell of a community.”

“Ultimately, we really need to answer what is a city for — for the people who live here, or who vacation here and make money off it?” Morris said, acknowledging he has friends with vacation rentals and is “conflicted” about the issues.

But like others who spoke later, he referred to “arterial bleeding in our neighborhoods. It’s a gold rush that needs to be stopped.”

Capell pointed out that while councilors hands aren’t completely tied on the matter, the legal requirements of land-use law mean “whatever we do will likely get appealed” to the state, at greater expense and time before anything could go into effect.

“If you were sitting here (as a councilor, what would you do?” he asked.

“Whatever is in your legal power to do,” Morris replied.

Others spoke of the vacation rental boom adding to the rent squeeze that’s forcing many to scramble for a place to live.

Annie Goldner, owner of one of just three bed-and-breakfasts in Bend — B&Bs are more strictly regulated, at least for now — pointed out how online sites like Airbnb have helped fuel the vacation rental surge. (City Manager Eric King later noted the San Francisco City Council recently held a seven-hour hearing on Airbnb alone.)

Goldner begged the council to act now and stop issuing permits for more rentals, but soon added, “I don’t know what you can do, legally.”

Stephen Junkins said residents have taken to reading up on city development codes on their Saturday mornings, this as just over the past years, “Many of our neighbors just disappeared. … The neighborhood hollowed out from underneath us in a very quiet, stealthy way. Now we’re surrounded by high-traffic commercial hotel businesses,” and all the issues that come along with it – and confusion over who to talk to about them – the guest, the homeowner, the property manager?

Bend’s current lax rules or enforcement, are “way out of the norm for most cities,” which protect their residential neighborhoods, especially in the walkable urban core, Junkins said. In many cities, vacation rentals are not allowed in residential neighborhoods, while others have a density limit, require permit numbers in their ads or require owners to live in a home most of the year, or live adjacent to the rental.

Lorin Hayden said he had benefited from vacation rentals in her neighborhood, but now, with 40 percent of the homes on Georgia Avenue vacation rentals, “I can see that it’s going to get out of hand. In the words of my kid, ‘Who am I going to play with, to hang out with?'”

Earlier Wednesday, before testifying at City Hall, vacation rental owner Jackie Haworth said, “We are a resort town, that’s the whole thing. We are a resort town!”

Asked about possible caps on the number of vacation rentals in a street or neighborhood, Haworth said, “I could understand something like that, if they just really find out that it’s just too much impact on the city or something, which I can’t imagine being the case. But you can’t take away people’s livelihood.”

It’s a livelihood supported by the floods of tourists we experience in Bend year in and year out.

“I’m almost all booked for next summer already,” Hayworth said.

But neighbors spoke of missing having someone to borrow a cup of sugar from.

And one resident spoke of more than a wistful missing of neighbors — but of dangers.

“These old mill houses are fire traps,” said retired firefighter Monte Payne. “They are not built to code, the walls are stuffed with newspaper.” And he said not requiring inspections for fire safety, such as alarms or extinguishers, is “morally unacceptable.”

Madeleine Simmons, who lives on Federal Street — one of the hardest-hit areas in vacation home conversions, also requested an immediate moratorium on any more such homes, and also said the neighborhood has too many liquor licenses.

“A poor kid can’t get milk, but he can get a beer,” she said. “In six months, it’s going to be over on the Westside, for living in a really nice community.”

But some vacation rental owners defended their efforts – not just the taxes they pay, but efforts to make sure people who love to visit Bend have good places to stay in the area.

Then there was vacation rental owner Victoria Smith, who came as a tourist 20 years ago and had never been at a council meeting before. She said she is very strict about her rentals, with a set of rules to follow and who reminds guests they are in a residential area. If they violate the rules, they are blacklisted.

Noting the thousands in room taxes they collect for the city, she said, “We brought Bend back. How many people lost their homes? It does need to be regulated.” Another rental owner said she, too, has strict rules and is reachable 24/7, but said there are “significantly more (rentals) flying under the radar” you can find watching Websites.

Another frustrated vacation rental neighbor spoke of late-night hot-tub gatherings five feet from her bedroom window, of drunken people crawling over the fence.

Councilor Doug Knight urged the city to require conditional use permits for vacation rentals, noting a letter submitted by land-use lawyer Bruce White that said the city was failing to follow its own rules.

But City Attorney Mary Winters said she had not had time to review the letter submitted at the council meeting.

Knight made a three-part motion to set a November hearing on a temporary suspension of vacation rental permits in the three most-affected neighborhoods. He also sought a review of whether the city can require conditional-use permits for the rentals, and said any current rentals not properly permitted would be prohibited from operating.

But after a lot of back-and-forth among councilors about what to do and how soon, the motion failed on a 3-4 vote.

Instead, councilors agreed to have staff return in two weeks with answers to some of the legal and planning issues raised Wednesday night, along with a timeline that could mean action, perhaps in November, on imposing a yearly, renewable fee to check that rentals are following codes and regulations. That, and the idea of caps or limits on new vacation rentals, could take some time, since the planning commission would be involved.

Mayor Jim Clinton put it this way: “The code is a mess, and it has not served our community. And we should get off the dime and say we’re going to fix it.”

But he added, “We don’t need to jam a bunch of process in the next two weeks. … We’re going to go ahead and revise the code. It’s not working. It’s hammering our neighborhoods. (But) we understand we have a lot of process we’re going to have to go through.”

And colleague Victor Chudowsky said, “We have to be careful. We’re under pressure to do something. But I would rather wait longer to do something effective.”