Maine has experienced a short-term rental boom since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and one midcoast community wants to know how that’s impacting permanent housing options.
The Belfast Planning Board will discuss ordinance amendments at a meeting on Wednesday. The amendments would create a registry of short-term rentals in the city. Officials say it’s the first step to answering a number of questions and concerns community members have raised in recent months regarding the impact that services like Airbnb and Vrbo are having on the city’s already strained housing supply.
“We wanna try to have an understanding of what’s going on in the city to see if those fears are actually playing out,” said Jon Boynton, Belfast’s city planner.
If the planning board comes to an agreement on the amendments following public comment, the changes will go to the City Council for final approval.
Belfast has been discussing the impact of short-term rentals, such as Airbnb’s, since January, and having an accurate understanding of the short-term rental landscape, including how many there are and who owns them, is important when making data-informed policy decisions, Boynton said.
But for those who’ve operated short-term rentals for years, the idea of registering with the city feels like an overreach.
Caitlin Hills has rented her house in Belfast out through Airbnb for around eight years and said she relies on that income to be able to afford living there. She even built a small log cabin that she stays in while visitors use the house during the summer, she said.
She and other short-term rental owners raised concerns about potential regulations at past planning board meetings. The latest proposal does seem to have taken those into account, she said. But even with the changes, it still feels like short-term rentals are getting treated differently from other rentals.
“It’s inconsistent. The people that rent out their homes long term are not required to register their properties to my knowledge, so I just don’t know why a different set of rules would be applied to a different constituency,” Hills said.
Although the city planning board has discussed broader regulations on short-term rentals in the past, Boynton stresses the only major change on the table at Wednesday’s hearing is the creation of the database and the addition of potential fees for registration and noncompliance that will ultimately be decided by the City Council. For instance, previous language on inspection requirements, which short-term rental owners pushed back against in the past, are not included in the amendments.
The hearing will take place at Belfast City Hall during the planning board’s meeting. It begins at 6 p.m. It will be the first formal opportunity for public comment on the amendments, and Boynton expects strong opinions on both sides on the issue of short-term rentals.
“You’re gonna get both extremes, and the answer is some place in the middle,” Boynton said. “Our job, of the board and staff like myself, is to figure out what that happy medium is.”
