[2026-05-11]
THE NEWS
LA’s Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) committee is meeting tomorrow (Tuesday, May 12, 2026) to discuss several short-term rental (STR) policy changes under consideration. (Short-Term rentals = AirBnb, VRBO, etc.)
To understand the current Short-Term Rental rules today, here’s the City’s ordinance. Here’s a quick reference:
- Primary residence only. Hosts have to live in the home for >6 months a year. Can operate only 1 home-sharing unit at a time.
- RSO and income-restricted units not allowed.
- ADUs not allowed, if permitted on or after January 1, 2017, unless it’s the host’s primary residence.
- Hotels and Apart-Hotels must follow hotel rules.
SPECIFICS
Item 15: Council File # 25-0029-S1
- What? Reviews the idea of implement a temporary change in the short-term rental rules (they end 12-2028)
- Why? so folks can rent out housing they own that’s not their primary residence. (E.g., any investor that owns units can join the short-term rental play.)
- And, per AirBnB, why that’s “good” policy? The change puts a lot more lodging on the market for coming “big events” (FIFA, Olympics), generating additional Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), which then goes into the City’s beleaguered budget. Plus AirBnb has offered to pay the additional TOT in advance of the rule change.
Our Take: This is Not Good Community-Serving Policy
- AirBnB is pushing the City to max out the AirBnB business opportunity at the expense of protecting long-term housing.
- Once the “temporary rules” are on the books, who’s taking responsibility for eliminating those “temporary” not-my-primary-residence short-term rental units? In other words, once the Genie is out of the bottle, who’s going to discipline AirBnb to remove those listings?
Item 16: Council File # 14-1635-S10
- What? Changes the rules to allow neighbors who have obnoxious AirBnb renters next door to undertake new “Private Right of Action.”
- Why? Today short-term rental aggrieved neighbor complaints are slow to process.
- Current rules: after 2 citations a host is suspended from renting for 30 days.
- After 3 citations have been issued and “sustained” the host’s right to rent will be revoked.
- Citations can issued by LA Housing, LA Building & Safety, the Fire Department, and LAPD.
- The trick: citation-worthy complaints are heard by a 7-member volunteer panel. (Yes, you read that right.)
- By adding this ordinance amendment (Private Right of Action), the City opens a new pathway for aggrieved neighbors to get more traction on accountability for bad AirBnB neighbors.
- Details? The new 3-step process allows the Aggrieved Neighbor to “commence civil action” against violators if the City Attorney’s Office is not going to investigate within 60 days of receiving the grievance or fails to notify the Aggrieved Neighbor of its intent to pursue within 65 days.
Our Take: Better than current process, but still pretty weak.
Your neighbor rents out his house 100 days a year. It becomes a party house and now you have a DJ dropping beats until 4am nearly every night the house is rented.
What can you do? Work on getting that neighbor cited and filing an official complaint. However, turn-around time on judgement+citation for this bad landlord behavior is a question of case load for the volunteer hearings panel. It’s a step in the right direction to allow aggrieved neighbors to kick-start their own complaint process. But ultimately, an overloaded, volunteer-driven accountability system ends up serving landlords far better than aggrieved neighbors.
WHY WE CARE ABOUT SHORT-TERM RENTAL POLICY
BaBWP keeps an eye on this policy space because there’s good evidence that a proliferation of AirBnB or VRBO rentals in the City (and County) make long-term rentals harder to find and more expensive.
- According to this 2022 report from McGill, an estimated 2500 long-term rentals were converted to AirBnb type use.
- The city itself reported that about 60% of the city’s AirBnb listings are illegal (meaning not registered to operate as a Short Term Rental.) And that’s a big problem. Illegal (unregistered) units often operate in direct violation of the LA rules, which were written after massive public input and designed to keep a lid on losing too many units to short-term rental.
Our proximity to LAX puts our community into a unique double bind, pitting housing for the local work force against the highly profitable business of short-term rentals.
