Last night the Woodstock Town Board approved a nine-month moratorium on new applications from homeowners who wish to rent out their homes for short periods of time to visitors. Also halted are new applications for transient accommodation uses and residential conversions.
Woodstock Town Supervisor Bill McKenna said the temporary limit on new short-term rentals will protect the welfare of its residents, especially those who have struggled to find affordable housing in the wake of the region’s pandemic-related real estate boom. During the time of the moratorium, the town will review its Comprehensive Plan, which addresses town planning and design needs.
The pause will “give us a breather and an opportunity to take a look at our laws,” said McKenna. “This is not an effort to be more restrictive about development, but to look at what type of development we need, which is affordable rentals and homes for purchase so we can maintain diversity in our community.”
The moratorium, and a previously approved cap that limits the total number of short-term rental units in town to 285, are reflective of a larger debate being waged as to the relationship between these rentals and long-term housing inventory. While local officials say the moratorium and cap are needed to fight expanding affordable housing concerns, homeowners who rent their properties on platforms like Airbnb say there is little correlation between their home-based vacation rentals and affordable long-term rental housing inventory.
An Airbnb spokesperson said the company encourages “the Town Board to develop regulations that allow more equitable access to home sharing, which will in turn support the local economy.”
He continued: “We know many homeowners are struggling now more than ever to make ends meet without the financial flexibility home sharing provides, especially since the Town Board reduced the amount of permits available last year.”
Airbnb host Michael, who asked to not share his last name, has owned his Woodstock property as a second home since 2004. He and his family actively use the home every summer and rent it out for short stays the rest of the year because it “seemed wasteful to keep it empty,” he said.
“We wanted to be a part of the town as much as we could – our children learned to swim at the town pool, took tennis lessons in town and performed in town performances,” said Michael, who argued that he would not be renting his home to a long-term tenant, such as with a standard year-long lease, because he uses his home at various periods during the year.
Noisy, unknown neighbors are another concern shared by those in opposition to Airbnbs. Michael said that he screens potential guests carefully to ensure they won’t create a disruption for any neighbors, and he has imposed a fine on any guests who do garner a complaint. He said he hasn’t needed to issue the fine in recent years.
Michael pointed to his employment of local housekeeping and landscaping services as examples of how he has used his short-term rental to support businesses in town. In an Oxford Economics study reported by Airbnb in May 2021, Airbnb hosts keep up to 97 percent of listing fees, and usually return that money back to the community through investment in local goods and services.
The previously approved short-term rental permit cap in the Woodstock caught Michael by surprise.
“It was quite frustrating to get a notification that we needed to get a permit, and in the same letter it said, ‘Hey, by the way, there are no permits,’” said Michael, who received the letter in May.
Assessing the real impact of short-term rentals
Michael fears that with the loss of revenue from renting his property, he will have to sell it. There is no guarantee it would be sold to someone in need of long-term affordable housing — it could be sold to a wealthy investor who leaves the property vacant most days, resulting in a loss of local economic benefits, he said.
McKenna concurred that the town sees some economic benefits of short-term rentals like Airbnb and VRBO, but he believes these rentals also go hand in hand with limited affordable long-term rental inventory.
“I don’t believe short-term rentals are the total problem,” said McKenna. “But I do believe it’s exacerbating a problem that we’ve had in Woodstock for a longtime – it’s taking affordable rental units off the market.”
McKenna said he hears some residents say they aren’t supportive of second homeowners who want to list their homes when they are away. “However, that home is never going to be an affordable [long-term] rental unit,” said McKenna.
Where McKenna sees opportunity is in cases of owner-occupied properties that also have a cottage or other dwelling on the same parcel that could be better used for long-term rentals but instead have been rented as short-term accommodations. “That’s where we are losing our affordable housing,” said McKenna.
A Moody’s Analytics study on how to overcome the nation’s housing supply shortage released in March of this year concluded that a lack of housing – which the study attributed partly to record-high lumber costs as well as supply chain and labor issues that limited new home construction — is a primary driver of the housing shortage, and did not cite short-term rentals as a factor.
Meanwhile, 2019 analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank created to address the needs of low- and middle-income workers, recognized some economic benefits of Airbnbs but concluded that those benefits do not outweigh the costs to local jurisdictions in the form of tax revenue and potentially higher housing costs for local residents if enough properties for long-term housing were converted to short-term accommodations. The analysis also concluded that those benefiting from short-term rentals were disproportionately white and high-wealth households.
Management of short-term rental permits
While Michael wasn’t able to obtain a short-term rental permit, he is still able to rent seasonally for stays longer than 30 days. However, that means his family won’t visit Woodstock this summer for the first time since they bought the home 17 years ago.
“The town is inadvertently creating an economic commodity – these permits,” said Michael, who advocated for a system that allowed waitlists or more transparency surrounding the caps, or for the town to distinguish between real estate investors and people who have been coming to Woodstock for years.
McKenna agreed that the system isn’t a perfect, especially because the permits were issued on a first-come, first-serve basis, which left a number of people shorthanded. But, he says, those permits “shouldn’t be a lifetime permit at the detriment to other property owners.”
Kirk Ritchey, Town of Woodstock Housing Committee Chair, said the number of permits, 285, was chosen based on the number of previous short-term rentals in Woodstock.
One potential scenario would be shifting to a system of rotating those available permits. McKenna said all of Michael’s suggestions are “potentially on the table,” too.
“While we’re taking this nine-month breather, we have a committee that will look at what changes we should make with the rental cap to conform with our comprehensive plan,” said McKenna.
Short-term rental regulation laws aren’t necessarily new. Around the world, restrictions have been implemented – in Paris short-term rentals are limited to 120 days a year; in London that number is 90; and in Amsterdam it’s 60.
Regionally, Woodstock isn’t alone. Saugerties is also looking for new ways to regulate short-term rentals after neighbors reported more noise complaints, and towns across the Capital Region and Hudson Valley are exploring how to balance short-term accommodations with long-term housing needs.
Across the river in Red Hook, meanwhile, council members are pushing for a zoning change that would allow for more short-term rentals in a wider section of the town to boost the local economy.
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