Houston residents with horrific stories of criminal activity and nightly nuisances have weighed in on the city’s proposed ordinance to regulate short-term rental properties listed on platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. Property managers who say they offer a service to cancer patients and business travelers have also criticized the plan, saying the fees are exorbitant and the mandates miss the mark.
Now the small mom-and-pop operators have entered the chat, and guess what? They don’t like the ordinance either. It was written by the city’s Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department, reviewed and revised by legal staff, and incorporates significant stakeholder input, according to city officials.
Ruth Whittaker, representing the Washington, D.C.-based Chamber of Progress — described by members as a “left-leaning trade association” that promotes technology advancement in, among other things, the home-sharing and ride-sharing economy — said Houston’s proposed regulations would disproportionately harm small businesses and family hosts.
She said she’s particularly concerned that the proposed ordinance dictates that permit and registration numbers be provided on listing platforms. There’s also a “notice and takedown” requirement that authorizes the city to force a platform to remove a listing that’s not in compliance or be subject to penalties.
“It creates an obligation for the platforms to verify that the certificate of registration numbers are correct,” Whittaker said. “How does the platform verify that the … number is correct? What happens if there’s a typo in the listing? The fines for violations compound by the day so it really sets up an incentive for platforms to be over-cautious and take down any listings that they think are not totally correct so they avoid the fines.”
If a listing is removed, the operator has to go to the city and the platform to get it restored, Whittaker explained.
“The concern here is not that Airbnb is being regulated,” Whittaker said. “The concern is that hosts, individual homeowners who are just trying to earn a little bit of extra income, are going to be the ones who feel the effects of this regulation.”
Jason Ginsburg, founder of Houstonians Against Airbnb, said the proposed ordinance creates a legal framework for shutting down nuisance short-term rentals, “which is not nothing.”
“The problem is that a framework for action is not action itself,” he said. “This thing is basically a vehicle without any gas and no one to drive it.”
Related: Houstonians Say Nearby Short-Term Rentals Make Them Prisoners in Their Own Homes
Referencing a statement Council Member Julian Ramirez made to the Houston Press last month that “enforcement is key,” Ginsburg questioned how the city will go after offenders when they can’t currently get an officer to respond to a noise complaint due to other higher-priority calls.
“And even if a complaint can be ticketed, how vigorously will it be prosecuted?” Ginsburg asked.
The ordinance slated for a vote this week proposes a $275-per-unit registration fee, a requirement that 24/7 emergency contact information be posted and a stipulation that if two or more convictions are secured in a 12-month period, the property will be removed from its hosting platform. An outright ban on neighborhood short-term rentals is illegal, Ramirez has said, and Houston can’t tackle the problem through zoning ordinances the way other Texas cities have done.
Critics on all sides of the issue acknowledge that Houston’s lack of zoning creates challenges, but several have proposed thoughtful amendments for city leaders to consider.
In a lengthy email to council members on Friday, Houston resident Miguel Kremenliev said the proposed ordinance and process to date has been “meek and unserious at best, negligent at worst, and we need one or more adult(s) in the room to push pause on this process before we have lost our best, and quite possibly last, real chance to protect Houstonians.”
“This ordinance has neither the funding nor the enforcement mechanism, to stand any chance of success against the formidable STR interests aligned against peaceful Houstonians in several targeted neighborhoods,” Kremenliev wrote. “The vultures are circling, but we still have signs of life, and don’t have to succumb by euthanizing our community rights.”
Kremenliev suggested the city consider “putting some teeth into the current draft” by adding firm parking limitations, an emergency contact who can respond immediately and take corrective action, a sunset provision that the regulations expire after a set period for re-evaluation, and “accurate and appropriate” fees and taxes.
While the neighbors’ concerns are valid, Whittaker said the livelihood of the small operators who have been renting their homes in good faith for years should also be considered.
“The impact for hosts is really an important thing to consider here, not just for hosts but also for the city and for small businesses,” she said. “It’s important for all those entities that they get this right and this ordinance doesn’t end up unintentionally shutting people out of the market or unintentionally benefiting large real estate investors and the hotel industry at the expense of homeowners.”
Houston had about 8,548 advertised short-term rentals as of November 2024. Many of those hosts are on-site operators renting out their primary homes, Whittaker said.
“They live in this space,” she said. “They don’t want to open it up to rowdy parties.” The draft ordinance “gets it right” on some of the language, Whittaker added.
“It has a prohibition against advertising short-term rentals as an event space,” she said. “It has pretty clear criteria for the city to revoke a permit to operate a short-term rental. Those make sense. The city should be able to take action against people who are harming the community, making the residents and consumers of the product unsafe and who aren’t following existing noise ordinance laws.
“Our focus really is on the way these regulations affect individual hosts and I think the overarching concern that we’ve seen — and the effects that we’ve seen with overburdensome short-term rental regulations — is that they really benefit the real estate investors and the people who are full-time short-term rental operators and hotels,” she added. “Hotels and the larger real estate investors have compliance departments. They have the budget to keep up with bureaucratic processes in a way that individuals who are renting out their homes don’t. They will probably be fine no matter which way this ordinance shakes out … What we’ve seen in a lot of survey data is that individual homeowners rely on the money they make from renting out their properties on short-term rental platforms to actually keep up with mortgage payments to stay in their homes and keep up with the rising cost of living.”
Stakeholders with the Hotel and Lodging Association of Greater Houston also have criticized the ordinance and are expected to request amendments at this week’s public comment session on Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. The City Council will consider its voting agenda at 9 a.m. Wednesday.
