Rise in Sonoma County vacation rentals ignites blowback
Debbie Nitasaka says it hit her with a thundering blast early one summer morning three years ago: Life as she knew it in her small, Wine Country village was about to change.
She was awakened at 1:30 a.m. by the sounds from a neighboring home where a huge party was going on. Horns blasting. People yelling. Cars coming and going.
It wasn’t the Glen Ellen Firefighters Dance & BBQ, where a rumpus is raised once a year for a good cause and half the town attends.
It was, instead, the invasion of the vacation renters.
“I finally fell asleep at 4:30,” she recalled.
And that was just the beginning.
“All summer, every summer, into the fall and sometimes in February. Sometimes in April. We never know when they’ll come,” Nitasaka said. A community activist who years ago founded a program to help Sonoma Valley’s migrant laborers, she lives on a dead-end road in a middle-class neighborhood of working people and retirees. Her husband is a retired physician. But when the revelry began, he was still working and on call.
Complaints to the county, to the property owner, to the sheriff, she said, rarely provide relief.
The party house, once owned by a respected town elder, is now, she said, “like a roadhouse.”
“I hear screaming and yelling. I hear bottles breaking. I hear loud music,” Nitasaka said. “It’s either dark and creepy or loud and intrusive and horrible.”
It is an experience increasingly common, to one degree or another, across Sonoma County as residents confront the rapid spread of vacation rentals and their flow of paying customers - strangers on the block, sometimes noisy and bothersome - into everyday neighborhoods.
Vacation getaways have long been fixtures in the county’s top tourist stops, drawing visitors from across the country and around the world.
What’s changed is the number of homes, from humble bungalows to opulent estates, being transformed into short-term rental lodging. It is happening not just in destinations such as Kenwood and Geyserville, but in cities like Petaluma and Santa Rosa. And not just in places with acreage, but on streets with small lots where neighbors share fences.
The shift is being fueled by the exploding popularity of home-booking websites like Airbnb, Flipkey and Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO), which enable almost anyone with even a spare bedroom to become an instant innkeeper.
Hundreds hold permits
The county says there are 822 legally permitted rentals in the unincorporated area alone, more than half of which were approved after the county passed an ordinance. The largest batch is along the Russian River, followed by in Sonoma Valley and rural Healdsburg.
But the problem lies more often with the large number of properties without permits showing up in online listings, often with owners who don’t know or don’t follow rules such as noise curfews imposed on vacation rentals by some local governments.
The resulting complaints have poured in from residents countywide, sometimes pitting neighbor against neighbor and often outstripping the ability of officials to respond. Many detail daily nuisances and breaches of privacy.
Linda Duff, a teacher who lives a few blocks from Nitasaka up a mountain road, bought her Glen Ellen home for $265,000 in the 1980s, back when 10 acres with a view could be had by a couple of modest means. She said the first sign of the change was the bewildering appearance of limousines, struggling to turn around on her steep road.
“There’s no accountability. They’re not thoughtful,” she said. “They don’t care who lives up the street, who might have a baby or who might be elderly. Houses are sold, but nobody moves in. You don’t know who is here.”
It’s the latest dust-up in the ongoing clash of interests between residents who seek out quiet in the countryside, small towns and city side streets of the North Coast and the wine and tourist industries that drive the local economy and draw some 7.5 million visitors a year.
“This is part of a larger issue, the whole issue of rural character and tourism and where our county is going,” said Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, who represents the heavily affected areas outside Healdsburg and Geyserville.
A related and perhaps equally pressing issue for local governments is losing out on a significant amount of tax revenue from rentals that fly under the radar. An audit by the Sonoma County Auditor-Controller’s Office estimated that the county was losing $500,000 to $1.3 million a year from short-term vacation rentals in the unincorporated areas that don’t pay the required hotel bed taxes. Cities also have expressed concern over similar lost revenue.
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