After an exhausting summer tour through all of the Council’s many committees, the 2035 Comprehensive Plan is one step away from final adoption. Yesterday the Council’s Planning, Land Use and Zoning Committee made its final amendments to the document, and voted to approve it out of committee.
Since this week’s Full Council meeting was adjourned early due to a protest, there is a backlog of items for next Monday’s meeting and the Comprehensive Plan will be put on the agenda for October 10th instead.
I just discovered your blog and read your article about AirBnbs tonight after dealing with an AirBnb problem in our neighborhood on the east side of Queen Anne. I haven’t had time to read the city council’s Comprehensive Plan and I may find my answer there, but for now I was hoping you might be able to explain more precisely how someone can operate what is essentially a hotel – a commercial enterprise – in what is clearly a residential zone. I also wrote to Sally Bagshaw several weeks ago requesting that she let me know when it comes under discussion at the city council. She did not respond. There are aspects to the invasion of AirBnbs and other short term rental companies that may not come under discussion, namely, the total lack of transparency provided by AirBnb. If you go to the site to lodge a grievance about rowdy behavior and noise, you are asked to sign a Terms of Agreement form, which I declined to do. And if you call their phone number, a recording requests a profile number. It’s maddening.
Tim Burgess is really the person driving the AirBnB regulations, so he would be the one to reach out to on when the legislation will move forward.
Burgess’s view is that people should not be able to operate a commercial hotel in residential neighborhoods. The hard part about regulating it, though, is that most people aren’t doing that, and finding the right places to draw lines in the sand between what is acceptable and what is not turns out to be very difficult.