Palm Springs votes on the fate of short-term rentals in the city in June with Measure C – and while there has been a barrage scaring residents into voting for tougher restrictions on vacation rentals and the local newspaper laid their odd reasons to reject it, the fact remains clear: not enough people have lived near short-term rentals to have an informed opinion about them.
Sure, more transient occupancy tax sounds great – not that the city is going to do anything useful with it. Also, and this is key, living next to a short-term rental sucks ass. After a long day at work, you want to just go home and relax. Well, fuck you. There is no relaxing because, after you have to search for parking all around the neighborhood due to the 50 cars parked outside of one house, the people in from Orange County next door want to party all night and are going to listen to their loudass music and do cannonballs into the pool.
Well, just call enforcement then like the pro-vacation rental people say. Sure, ok. You’ll just become a hotel front desk person / security guard even though you are in your own damn house in a residential neighborhood. Because that’s what you signed up for when you moved to Palm Springs, right?
As a Palm Springs resident, you should consider yourself lucky, since no one else can afford to do it anymore since Airbnb and local realtors would prefer that everyone just buy up homes “as investment properties” and turn them into mini-hotels from now on – and that should end up really well when home prices crater the next time the housing market dips, which it always does – but hey, that means another chance at a commission for a those realtors when all those “investors” scramble to sell them off before filing for bankruptcy.
Anyone who votes on Measure C should have to spend at least one night living next door to a vacation rental first. Deal with the noise, the parking, the trash, the worry of retaliation should you report the 10 bros next door for being loud, obnoxious, dickheads.
I imagine other cities actually give a damn about locals and don’t spend their days completely bending over backwards for the people who don’t actually live there.
Those cities sound nice.
