As more cities consider imposing restrictions on short-term lodging in private residences, purveyors of the service, like Airbnb, have not been idle. This year, for the first time, Airbnb and others have registered lobbyists in Sacramento and, according to a recent report in the Orange County Register, “Airbnb reported spending more than $67,000 on lobbying through the first half of this year.”
But traditional hoteliers are way ahead of them. According to recent data, the hotel and restaurant industry spent $3.4 million on state lobbying on a number of issues last year — including the ill-fated Senate Bill 593, which aimed to tax short-term rentals the same as hotel rooms.
In the eyes of government, companies like Airbnb and others have committed the cardinal sin of making consumers question the omnipotence of government rules while threatening the tax collectors, hoteliers and other industries protected from competition through regulation.
Their entrenched competitors have taken notice and gone so far as to invest in forming pressure groups for angry residents to petition their local government for regulations, and locals are happy to oblige because of the revenue hotel taxes bring.
But short-term rental companies have learned from Microsoft’s bitter experience with Washington in the late 1990s — to get ahead you have to play the game — and they are adding to the growing throng of lobbyists descending on the state Capitol, along with a growing number at the local level.
It is a situation that comes about when government seeks to interfere in too much.
Principle often takes a back seat when we are personally aggrieved, but using government to ban residents from deriving economic benefit from their own property — or to make the process so arduous as to effectively prohibit it — is a violation of property owners’ rights.
Neighbors certainly have legitimate grievances with rowdy renters, cramped parking and discarded trash. Those are issues that must be addressed, as the enjoyment of one’s property is a right of residents on both sides of the issue. But to limit the size and scope of government, along with those who trade in influencing it, we must not assume that there is a governmental solution, at least one not so overbearing, to every societal ill.
Courtesy of Wikimedia 
