Airbnb investor on South Lake Tahoe ban: ‘Short-term rental Armageddon’

Rohin Dhar, who claims to have Airbnbs in Sonoma, Kauai, Taos, Mount Hood, Yosemite, and Asheville, wrote that the resort city’s near total ban implemented more than five years ago created a “short-term rental Armageddon.” However, instead of easing the housing affordability crisis within the city, he claims, “home prices cratered, and people scooped them up as second homes,” and he claims that some of them are sitting empty. 

“There is still a housing affordability crisis … When a resort area bans Airbnb, the only thing that happens is wealthy people get good deals on second homes that mostly sit around vacant,” Dhar wrote on the social media platform, mocking the so-called Measure T. 

Measure T was a citizen-initiated ballot measure intended to regulate vacation or short-term home rentals in South Lake Tahoe, as the city’s website states. It went into effect at the end of 2018 and required the phasing-out of all vacation home rental permits in residential areas and across all multifamily properties over a three-year period. Of course, it also prohibited new vacation home rental permits in residential areas. But Measure T doesn’t apply to existing or future short-term rentals in nonresidential areas—and some people can still rent their homes, if they’re a permanent resident and are renting their entire home for up to 30 days a year. 

In the summer of last year, an appeals court upheld Measure T’s ban on short-term rentals after the South Lake Tahoe Property Owners Group filed a lawsuit—although one issue, regarding permanent residents’ ability to rent their homes, was sent back to trial court, according to the Tahoe Daily Tribune, a local paper. 

From the end of 2018 to the end of last year, home prices in South Lake Tahoe…