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Opinion

Mason: Short-term rental industry is in trouble

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The STR industry is in trouble. People are rising up to save their neighborhoods and are demanding meaningful restrictions on STRs.

State and local governments are responding to peoples’ demands for increasingly restricting STRs. Not even the Airbnb, Vrbo, and the STR industry’s hundreds of billions will be enough to stop restrictions and their business model will become unsustainable and will have to change or they will fail.

People are, “The Unrepresented Stake Holders” and “the victims,” who are being disrupted, where they live, by STRs, not those quietly residing elsewhere: investors, traveling public, online operators, tourism industry, lobbyist, politicians, owners.

It is people who are the backlash against STRs ruining their neighborhoods. It is people who demand and are getting restrictions on STRs.

The STR industry business model depends on disrupting neighborhoods by changing homes for neighbors into lodgings for transients, and residential zones of neighbors into lodging zones of transients.

STRs disrupt people, where they live, and make neighborhoods no longer decent, safe, and welcoming places to live, moms afraid to let children play outside, neighbors leave, and communities ruined.

The STR industry ignores how people are affected by STRs and is becoming perceived as “anti-people,” “anti-family,” “anti-community,” “anti-neighborhood” and “anti-property rights,” and denying that STRs; impact people and their neighborhoods.

STRs are increasingly seen as “hotels” for transients, who have no concerns for neighbors or neighborhood, and with owners who live far away.

The STR industry claims private property rights are important, but whose, people experiencing STR caused disruptions or the STR industry wanting to make a buck at their expense?

Private property rights do not include rights to cause disruption to other peoples’ property rights to decent, safe, and welcoming places to live, as STRs do.

The STR industry actions show disdain and disrespect for the property rights of people and families, and their neighborhoods, as confirmed in the March 1 report by Elliott Pollack & Co., which revealed the indirect negative impacts of the STR industry are actually direct attempts to undermine existing local land use control.

The simple truth is, STRs are horrendous, especially for people who happen to live near one, and no one wants to live next to an STR. It is doubtful if any STR industry executives, or lobbyist, or STR owners live next to an STR.

The STR industry is in trouble because STRs disrupt people and neighborhoods where they live and do not belong in neighborhoods nor next to family homes and STRs are not residential use but places of lodging.

Editor’s Note: David Mason is a resident of Scottsdale.