In the early morning of Jan. 1, a shooting occurred in the College Park Estates neighborhood at an un-hosted Airbnb rental that shocked and traumatized the community.
Five months and 375 signatures later, the neighborhood has banned unhosted short-term rentals (STRs), and four other neighborhoods have applications pending hoping to do the same.
An STR is a room or entire home rented out for 30 or fewer consecutive days. These are commonly referred to as Airbnbs, though recently renters have begun using other sites such as Vrbo, RentCafe, and Sublet.com, making it difficult to track the number of STRs in a city.
Long Beach passed its current STR ordinance in 2019, then expanded the program in 2022 to allow 250 STRs per year to register in coastal zones.
According to the Long Beach Community Development website, 871 STRs are registered in the city as of May 6.
At least 626 of these units are unhosted or non-primary, meaning the owner and renter of the unit do not live at the residence. The site shows 238 registered primary units, meaning the owner and renter reside on the property at least 275 days out of the year.
However, AirDNA, a market performance site that tracks short-term rentals, listed 1,981 total STR listings in Long Beach and 1,296 active listings. On the same site, Signal Hill has 134 total STR listings.
The College Park Estates neighborhood is the first group to successfully pass a petition to ban unhosted STRs, squeaking by with a 51% majority of signatures in the neighborhood.
Nine groups have attempted to ban unhosted STRs in their area this year, a dramatic increase since Long Beach passed its STR ordinance in 2019. Two groups circulated petitions to ban un-hosted STRs in 2021 — both failing to gain the majority amount of signatures needed — and one neighborhood attempted and failed to do so in 2022.
Registering an STR in Long Beach costs $250 and is valid for one year.
Property owners can also rent out STRs following these guidelines:
- 1-10 units on the property qualifies for one STR
- 11-50 units on the property qualify for 10% of units to be STRs
- 51-100 units on the property qualify for 12% of units to be STRs
- 101 units or more on the property qualify for 15% of units to be STRs
In recent years, some major cities have introduced stringent regulations and caps on STRs such as limiting the amount of days an STR can be rented and limiting the amount of functioning STRs per zip code. Long Beach is not one of those cities.
Nine groups have attempted to ban unhosted STRs in their area this year, a dramatic increase since Long Beach passed its STR ordinance in 2019.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors began talks in February about regulating STRs in unincorporated parts of the county.
Councilmember Daryl Supernaw, who represents the district in which the College Estate Park neighborhood is located, asked the City to explore enforcement options for nuisance STRs following the Jan. 1 shooting.
Supernaw also asked that the city streamline the complaint and reporting process, which currently begins with the STR complaint hotline and then is sent to a number of different departments depending on what the issue is.
Multiple councilmembers expressed concern about “rewriting” the ordinance, including Mayor Rex Richardson, who said he wants to look at the issue through a “city-wide lens” rather than make an ordinance change based on one incident.
In an interview with the Signal Tribune, Supernaw said he’s not asking the City to reinvent the wheel. Supernaw said that in the last nine years, he had never received a complaint about an STR in his district. Then in the last year, he said he’s received three.
This follows the trend of the drastic increase in neighborhoods attempting to ban unhosted STRs altogether. One of Supernaw’s requests was to educate the public on how to make a complaint about an STR.
“Because we hadn’t had any issues, we didn’t know there was a flaw in the communication system,” Supernaw told the Signal Tribune. “Let’s look at what’s already there and what we’re not enforcing.”
While some residents are taking action due to their STR fatigue, removing STRs may have an impact on Long Beach’s tourist economy, one of the main methods identified by the City to boost the economy as oil revenue phases out. Visit Long Beach’s 2023 report estimated that overnight tourists brought in over $1.17 billion in spending on dining, transportation and attractions.
