“One thing that I’ve brought up a couple of times, and something that came to our attention at the last Town Council meeting, when a member of the public came in to complain about short-term rentals — they had just purchased a home in a cul-de-sac and there were five houses [in the cul-de-sac] and four of them were short-term rentals. And feeling that they were living in a hotel…”
We are listening here to Town Council member Nicole DeMarco, speaking at a joint meeting of the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners and the Town Council on June 23. The two local residents she mentions, who were “living in a hotel” instead of a neighborhood, addressed the Council on July 18.
“They are concerned about preserving the nature and character of our neighborhoods. And that’s what we’ve all sort of discussed, that after… well, we’ve all started enforcing [registration of short-term rentals]… the County started in October of last year?”
County Commissioner Ronnie Maez acknowledged that date with a nod.
Ms. DeMarco continued:
“And [the Town] started on January 1. So we’re thinking, after a year, we should get our numbers together and see, is it 10 percent of our homes that have become short-term rentals? Is it 20 percent? Do we want to establish a quota?
“No one really has a solution for it, but I think, after a year of having [registrations] in place, we should revisit it?”
Ms. DeMarco is correct, when she states that no one serving in an elected office with the Town or County has yet proposed a comprehensive solution to the destruction of Pagosa Springs neighborhoods by short-term rentals (STRs), although STRs are now required to “register.” But the simple “registration” of an unlimited number of such rentals is unlikely to be a solution to disappearing neighborhoods.
Other Colorado communities, however, are making an effort to control the destruction.
Durango CO, 50 miles to the west — for example — does not allow more than one vacation rental on any given “street segment” (measured from one corner to the next corner) in their historical downtown residential areas.
Salida CO, caps short-term rentals in residential zones at 3.5 percent of all units, and one per block; there is no cap in commercial zones. City officials announced last month that no short-term rental licenses are available in residential areas, and the city is not currently taking applications.
Denver does not allow vacation rentals unless the home is the owner’s “primary residence.” The City estimates a compliance rate in the 60 percent range, indicating that thousands of Airbnbs and VRBOs are currently violating the law, (and presumably making a tidy profit doing so.) We also note that about 40 percent of the Denver Airbnb advertisers are currently listing multiple properties, suggesting that they are renting out some units that don’t qualify as their “primary residence.”
Aurora has copied Denver’s “primary residence” rule, and so has Golden — except that Golden has added a requirement that the primary resident of the home has to live in the home for 10 months of the year.
According to data from AirDNA, a Denver-based firm that tracks and analyzes short-term rental activity worldwide, the number of listings in the Denver metro area, on the dominant platform Airbnb, jumped from approximately 1,700 in December 2014 to more than 8,300 last month. In Colorado, Airbnb listings shot up from nearly 6,000 four years ago to just over 36,000 in December 2018. That’s a six-fold increase, according to my pocket calculator.
Currently, neither the Town nor the Archuleta County government have set limits on the number of STRs allowed, in a neighborhood or in total. Nor do they require the home to be a “primary residence.”
Ms. DeMarco:
“We don’t want to demonize short-term rentals. I see a lot of value in what they provide… and we haven’t had to build any more hotels, even with the uptick in tourism. So if we do decide to cap the number, at maybe 20 percent of our housing…”
Indeed. We’ve seen an uptick in tourism, it seems, but we’ve also seen a significant downtick in the availability of affordable homes for local residents. What might it mean to “cap” the number of STRs in Archuleta County at 20 percent?
According to CityLab.com, a healthy rental vacancy rate is around 7 percent. I was not able to find the current rental vacancy rate for Archuleta County when I searched yesterday — I’m not sure anyone is actually tracking that number — but I did find an estimate of the total number of housing units, from a 2016 Region 9 Economic Development District report by researcher Donna Graves, who was looking at the impact of “second homes” on our economy.
8,239 total dwelling units, built on 7,990 residential parcels, in 2016. That same year, when I researched the number of Archuleta County STRs listed on the Tripping.com website, I found 678 listings.
That would suggest that, back in 2016, more than 8 percent of the total dwelling units in our community had already been converted into STRs.
I went back to the same website yesterday, and found a new number of STR listings in Pagosa Springs (highlighted in yellow):
This suggests that 1,551 units — units that, once upon a time, might have been available to local residents — have now been converted into STRs. That’s more than double the number in 2016, just three years ago. (We’ve also added some new homes since 2016, and the total number of dwelling units might be closer to 9,000 by now.)
But the problem is actually much bigger than what it appears on the surface, because that same 2016 Region 9 Economic Development District study found that about 41 percent of the homes in Archuleta County were owned by people with non-Archuleta addresses. That’s 3,300 homes — of which 11 percent were rented out, either short-term or long-term. That is to say, 300 rentals (short- or long-term) were identified in Ms. Graves’ report, while another 3,000 “second homes” apparently sit vacant for most of the year.
So we might have only 6,000 dwelling units potentially available to our population of full-time residents. And 1,550 units have been converted to STRs?
If Ms. DeMarco and her fellow elected officials really want to consider ‘capping’ the total number of STRs at 20 percent of the available homes… well, that bus may have already left the station. It’s possible that more than 25 percent of the total homes potentially available to owners and renters who live full-time in Archuleta County are now listed on Tripping.com as “vacation rentals.”
Did we mention, that a healthy rental vacancy rate is 7 percent?
With those numbers in mind, and with the knowledge that many full-time residents feel their once-friendly residential neighborhoods are being ruined by mini-hotels popping up like mushrooms all over the county, let’s listen to the Town Council and BOCC discuss the current STR crisis…