Month: January 2015

In my battle to limit vacation rentals, those that are either for them or not opposed to them keep claiming “property rights” such that the owner of a piece of property can do whatever he or she wants with the property. This is a very naïve view of the world and factually untrue in our modern society. We live in a society of laws and regulations which dictate what a person can and cannot do with property he or she owns.

For instance, while I own my house and property under it (OK, the bank owns part of it right now), I can’t build a farm on it, I can’t park cars in my front yard, I can’t build a gas station on it, I can’t build onto it without a permit, I can’t tear down my house and build condos (it is zoned as single family residential), etc.

So for anyone to claim that vacation rentals are a property right is mistaken. While the interpretation of the current regulations (I saw interpretation because the city attorney of San Diego has a different view on what constitutes a business than others do) doesn’t prohibit them, property rights doesn’t guarantee that they are allowed.

Some may be asking why I’m so interested in trash regulations. It’s quite simple, if the city won’t regulate vacation rentals, the more I can find and do to make vacation rentals less profitable, the more likely the vacation rental next door will go away.

Today I received confirmation that my analysis of trash regulations with respect to vacation rentals was correct. However, there are a number of problems in enforcing it:

• Terminating trash collection for those with a Transient Occupancy Registration Certificate unfairly rewards those that don’t have the certificate and haven’t been operating within the law. That’s a pretty poor excuse. What I’d suggest is work with the city treasurer to enforce the TOT registration by issuing a subpoena to AirBnB, VRBO.com, etc. for records of all listings in the city. Then overlay that data with the registered ones and cite those without the certificate (and collect back tax). In addition, encourage neighbors to report vacation rentals. I’d be more than happy to work on data crunching to assist in finding people skirting the law.

• If the city picks up the cans from the vacation rentals, nothing is stopping the owner from going to Home Depot, purchasing a trash can for automated collection and using it. The drivers don’t know who is supposed to get service and who isn’t. Again, this is an excuse. If the trash vehicles are equipped with GPS systems, work with the vendor to integrate a POI system that would alert the driver of properties to skip. If the vehicles aren’t equipped with GPS systems, it is about time they were as studies have shown that fleet vehicles like this can improve fuel economy with more efficient routes guided by GPS.

• For areas like Mission Beach where the houses are rented out most of the year to students 9 months of the year and 3 months of the year used as vacation rentals, would the city stop and start service? Look at the regulations; they don’t say that a “transient occupancy facility” has to be one the entire year. So, if it is ever used as a vacation rental, stop trash collection completely.

• If vacation rental owners have to get private trash service, there will be a big environmental impact of having additional trash vehicles on the street. Trash trucks not only have an environmental impact, they do numbers on the streets. I don’t have a solution for this problem.

• How does this get enforced? That’s another easy one to answer. Encourage neighbors to report their neighbors; offer rewards under whistleblower statutes using money from fines. I’m sure neighbors would be more than happy to report vacation rentals next door.

Basically unless the Environmental Services Department is instructed to enforce the regulations by the mayor, they won’t do anything. I’ve sent a letter to the mayor and city attorney requesting that the trash service be discontinued for my neighbor; that doesn’t help anyone else, but it is a start. Will I get a response from the mayor? I have no idea.

Can I sue the city to get them to enforce the current regulations? I have no idea and I’d need an attorney to do pro-bono work for me as I can see the cost going up pretty quickly.

Back in October, I wrote about vacation rentals and how they don’t fit into the spirit of my neighborhood. Since then, I’ve been researching as much as possible about it and trying to figure out what legal way I can help put an end to them. This is not a new battle as the communities of Pacific Beach and La Jolla have been trying to do something about curbing vacation rentals for years. I’ve setup a website to collect information about them.

While the spirit of the residential zoning laws don’t permit short term vacation rentals, the letter of the law permits it according to the city attorney (I don’t believe this interpretation, however).

I’ve been running through lots of different ideas in my head and last night it dawned on me that there may be a different tact. My neighbor has routinely put out his trash cans too early and removed them too late; the city requires that cans be put out after 6 pm prior to the day of pickup and removed no later than 6 pm the day of pickup. (SDMC §66.0105) This got me thinking, what other regulations are there with regards to refuse collection.

I found the regulations and got a huge smile on my face.

The City will not provide Non-Residential Refuse Collection Services, except for limited service to eligible small business enterprises if authorized by the City Council and in accordance with eligibility criteria established by the City Manager (Mayor).

Where “Non-Residential Refuse” is defined as:

Non-Residential Refuse means all refuse that is not Residential Refuse including, but not limited to, refuse generated at a commercial, industrial, institutional or transient occupancy facility, including but not limited to business facilities, hotels, motels, inns, bed & breakfast establishments, churches, non-profit organizations, and non-City government/public facilities.

and “Non-Transient Occupancy” is defined as:

Non-Transient Occupancy means occupancy through ownership, lease or rental for periods of one month or more.

So my layman’s interpretation on this is that one of 3 things has to happen:

• The City stops collecting refuse for all properties that are short term vacation rentals. The City can use the Transient Occupancy Registration Certificate information to find some (not all) vacation rentals in the city.

• The City Council has to declare that vacation rentals are eligible small businesses for refuse collection. This, however, could be problematic as saying that vacation rentals are businesses would make them not able to be in residential zones.

• The City Council has to amend the refuse collection regulations to allow collection from vacation rentals.

If refuse isn’t picked up at the thousands (someone showed me a list of over 1100 vacation rentals in PB alone as listed on a vacation rental website), it could create a big problem for the owners/operators of these facilities. It might convince them to stop having a vacation rental (that’s my hope anyway). In addition, I wonder if the City could send bills to those with vacation rentals for past collections. If the other 2 options are chosen, the City Council has to act which they have failed to do with respect to vacation rentals.

So far I haven’t heard back from the code enforcement officer at the Environmental Services Department, but this could be quite interesting.