Susan Sajadi stood before the Houston City Council in April 2024 and demanded that action be taken against a short-term rental property in West Houston, one that many neighborhood residents say has generated nothing but disturbance and trouble from its transient tenants.
The Westhaven Estates abode was for years advertised on Booking.com as a four-bedroom short-term rental available for up to 10 people at a time. The listing boasts free Wifi, a swimming pool and a hot tub. It’s less than five miles from Lakewood Church Central Campus and just down the street from Briargrove Elementary School.
Sajadi says problems have persisted since late 2021 and the short-term rental operator recently purchased more properties in the area. “They’re just going to turn it into Bourbon Street and spring break,” she predicted. And she, like others, wants Mayor John Whitmire and Houston City Council to do something to stop it.
Short-term rentals are favored by human traffickers, drug dealers and partiers, according to those who oppose them. The transient occupants don’t care whether trash is blowing all over the neighborhood and cars are blocking sidewalks and driveways. They don’t care if neighbors are waking up at 2 a.m. to the smell of marijuana and the sounds of people screaming and jumping off a roof into a swimming pool.
Tanglewood resident Alex Zhanov said he and his neighbors have been told to create their own homeowners association or hire private security, but that’s not a very immediate solution. Their homes are rapidly losing value because of the party house atmosphere, he told the City Council last year.
“Sometimes it’s an obnoxious nuisance but in our case it’s a facade for questionable or downright illegal activities,” Zhanov said. “The neighbors who gave up and want to escape and sell their homes cannot do that because they have to truthfully reveal the problems plaguing our neighborhood. Our property values are dropping. We feel like we are prisoners in our own homes. They’re not neighbors. They’re not guests. They’re invaders. We desperately need the city to step in and provide legal help.”
Short-term rentals are also taking homes off the market during an affordable housing crisis, opponents have argued.
But those who support short-term rentals say they provide a much-needed service for business travelers and guests who pour into the local economy. And residents who use them elsewhere, such as Houston City Council Member Mary Nan Huffman, talk about how convenient they are, especially when traveling with children.
The difference it seems, is whether the short term rental is being used as a hotel for all-night parties or a bed-and-breakfast for travelers who want to stay in a neighborhood and have access to a kitchen and other amenities.
The homes with pools and hot tubs tend to draw the most rambunctious crowds, said Deborah Quintero, who lives in the “WAMM” area bounded by Westheimer, Alabama, Montrose and Mulberry.
“People see a hot tub and they go into vacation mode,” she said.
A short term rental operator in Quintero’s neighborhood “stuffs” 12 people into a two-bedroom home with a loft, she said. The host is not on site and doesn’t immediately respond to calls or text messages about noise complaints, Quintero said.
“It has spiraled out of control,” she said. “People make money hand over fist but they don’t live in our neighborhood. They don’t care if the neighbors are disturbed, like the nurse who has to be at work at 4 a.m. They don’t care if they leave their trash cans out, overflowing with trash. And the parking. They block the sidewalks and it forces people in wheelchairs and mamas pushing baby strollers to walk in the street.”
Sajadi lives on Memorial Drive but owns property in Westhaven Estates where her brother and his family live. The issues in the Tanglewood area of West Houston aren’t just nuisances, she said. They’re crimes.
“The video that you saw [on the news] of the gentleman carrying that yellow boa constrictor and of the [women] leaving, that is where my 2-year-old nephew rides his tricycle,” she told the City Council at an April 9 meeting. “I am fed up. My family is fed up. Someone has to be held accountable. We have rules. We have regulations. We have deeds. We have restrictions. We have ordinances. What use is that if they are not being enforced? We don’t live in anarchy. I am tired of not being able to sleep thinking that my 2-year-old nephew is going to be shot by a stray bullet.”
Mayor Whitmire told Sajadi she has a right to be disgusted.
“You shouldn’t live like this,” he said. “Give us a chance. We’ll go to work on it.” He said this a year ago.
As of November 2024, there were more than 8,500 short-term rentals operating within the Houston limits.
Drafting an Ordinance
David Schwarte, a retired Arlington attorney, formed TX Neighborhood Coalition and has helped more than a dozen cities across the state craft ordinances that prohibit short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods. The ordinances typically involve zoning, which is not an available tool in Houston. Some of the ordinances, such as Arlington’s, have been successful in banning problematic neighborhood short term rentals; but many are tied up in litigation. A consensus, since Houston doesn’t have zoning, is that residents have to attack the problem through neighborhood deed restrictions.
“If you aren’t in a [homeowners association] now, so there are no provisions for amending the restrictive covenants, you can enter into agreements with your neighbors, like a contract, and you mutually agree that you will not engage in rentals of less than 30 days and you won’t advertise on the short-term rental platforms,” Schwarte said. “You could file that with the deed restrictions in the county real estate records. It would run with the land if you wrote it properly. The problem is, if your next door neighbor doesn’t want to sign, there’s not a thing you can do.”
The Houston Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department floated a draft ordinance at a December meeting of the City Council’s Quality of Life Committee, chaired by At-Large Council Member Julian Ramirez. The ordinance is being reviewed by the city’s legal department and will be presented to the full council for a vote at the end of this month.
Key takeaways from the draft include hefty registration fees and a 24-hour emergency contact who must be on site within an hour of notification about a complaint. Under the ordinance, short-term rental owners must display or otherwise provide information about trash pick-up, permissible sound levels, applicable parking rules, and security devices and cameras. Two or more citations resulting in convictions within a year can get the operator’s registration revoked.
The registration is revoked for just one conviction if the short-term rental operator or any occupant is convicted of kidnapping, unlawful restraint, smuggling of persons, reckless discharge of gun, trafficking of persons, prostitution, compelling prostitution, aggravated assault, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, sexual abuse of young child or disabled individual, sexual conduct or performance by a child, employment harmful to a child or disorderly conduct.
Residents who are up all night dealing with loud parties, parking violations and nuisances say they don’t expect the ordinance will bring much relief. Council members have cautioned that it may not solve everyone’s problems.
“I encourage everyone to set your expectations realistically,” Ramirez said at the December 9 committee meeting. “This is a contentious issue with compelling interests and arguments on both sides. The final product that the City Council approves … will represent the best compromise we can come up with. No one will get everything they want.”
Ramirez said in a phone interview last week he thinks the ordinance is a step in the right direction.
“Enforcement is key,” he said. “You can argue that’s why we’re in this position in the first place. I think the ordinance will be a step forward. If it’s not coupled with adequate enforcement, then a lot of people will be disappointed.”
The council member, who has been in office for about 14 months, said he thinks more personnel will be needed to enforce the ordinance.
Council Member Huffman, who represents the Tanglewood area that encompasses Westhaven Estates, said Friday calls have subsided about the property Sajadi referenced at last year’s council meeting. The property is listed for sale with a $799,900 price tag.
Huffman said she doesn’t necessarily think the ordinance is a cure-all that will eliminate the party house problem.
“Some of the language in there about how you have to get two convictions in order to be removed, that just seems very unlikely to happen within a 12-month period,” she said. “I love a good short-term rental. When I go on vacation, I like to stay in one, especially with kids. I just don’t know what the right answer is. Hopefully this ordinance will eliminate some of those problems, but the good actors out there, they’re already doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The companies like Airbnb and Vrbo are following the rules and trying to be good neighbors. It’s these rogue listings advertising on TikTok and Craigslist and things like that. I don’t know if it really will solve the problem.”
Houston already has a hotel ordinance that was adopted in the 1990s and “bans this kind of activity from residential neighborhoods,” said Jason Ginsburg, a real estate attorney and Montrose resident. The ordinance was designed to keep “hot-sheet” motels out of neighborhoods, he said. Ginsburg said he considers short-term rentals — frequently rented out for a single night or a weekend — to be hotels.
“The city has made a decision not to attempt to enforce [the hotel ordinance],” he said. “Houston does not have zoning. Houston has had to pass over the years, for lack of zoning, a lot of kind of backdoor zoning-esque regulations to keep certain offending activities that would usually be kicked out of a residential neighborhood by zoning, by ordinance.”
Ramirez and Huffman lauded the public engagement process and said they’ve taken feedback from residents who have lived through nightmares and short-term rental operators who are doing everything by the book and providing a much-needed service. Ginsburg said he thinks he’s on the short list of those who have a seat at the negotiating table.
“And I do know that there’s a very big, deeply padded seat with a cup holder for Airbnb and Vrbo,” he said.
Houstonians Against Airbnb
Ginsburg created Houstonians Against Airbnb when a former Houston Texans player bought five lots in Ginsburg’s neighborhood with the intent of turning them into short-term rentals.
“Originally when my neighbors and I ran up against him, we used every tool in the toolbox to try to slow him down,” Ginsburg said. “At the end of the day, the dude lives in River Oaks but he owns these vacant lots next to me. He is, in a sense, my neighbor, so I don’t want to be out there using him as a punching bag in public.”
The attorney explained that he’s self-employed and has time to organize Houston residents and show up at the City Council’s “pop off” public comment session to raise awareness about the short-term rental situation.
“I was the exact wrong person for [the NFL player] to try to build a hotel next to,” he said.
Because it hasn’t happened in Ginsburg’s neighborhood — yet — he hasn’t lived the nightmare scenario that other Montrose neighbors like Deborah Quintero have.
“We’re like the de facto night clerks,” Quintero said of herself and her neighbors. “We’re the ones jolted out of bed at 2 a.m. from a sound sleep when the renters come back from the clubs and the bars and they’ve brought the party home. We report to Airbnb and we have [the rental operator’s] number and we’ll text him, but the damage is already done. Sleep is lost. Some of us have to work the next day. We’re not getting paid to be the night clerk.”
The argument that banning Houston short-term rentals from neighborhoods has to be done through deed restrictions isn’t entirely accurate, Ginsburg said.
“Unless your deed restrictions specifically ban short-term rentals … the Supreme Court of Texas, which is very business-friendly, libertarian when it comes to economic issues, says you can’t use your restrictions to ban this sort of activity,” he said. “The most popular neighborhoods in Houston for these types of hotels — the Heights, Montrose — are so old they predate deed restrictions as a concept. The only time you can really rely on deed restrictions to keep these things out is if you’re in a six-pack of townhouses and all six of you agree that you want to update your restrictions.”
What’s Next
Ginsburg and Quintero have proposed some solutions for regulating unruly rentals.
While hotels have a desk clerk and on-site security, that burden is shifted to the neighbors, who have to call code enforcement or the police when a nuisance occurs or a crime is suspected, Ginsburg said.
“The genius behind these STRs is you are running a hotel but you’re not paying to staff a hotel,” he said. “Imagine running a bar or a club or a restaurant but not having to pay to staff it. They’re getting the benefit in labor savings by operating these things without any real supervision. The only supervision they have is the neighbors.”
Ginsburg wants an ordinance “with teeth” that forces operators to have noise monitoring services and cover code enforcement and public safety costs. He also wants city officials to enforce the ordinances that are already on the books. Ginsburg represents clients who operate short-term rentals and Quintero has a small bed-and-breakfast-style bungalow on her property that she rents out to guests — so they understand both sides of the equation.
“We’re not zealots,” Ginsburg said. “There are lots of things we can do to meet in the middle. By the way, the city may pass an ordinance and we might come back and find that ordinance to be too onerous or not effective enough. Definitely right now in the city of Houston, it’s the wild, wild west and that is a situation that cannot continue. The city does agree with us on that at a minimum because they’re working on it right now.”
There’s got to be a way to make it more difficult for the party houses to remain party houses, while the mom-and-pop operators who live on site can continue hosting guests with impunity, Quintero said.
Franklin Coley of the Florida-based Alliance of Stronger Communities has worked with Ginsburg and said Houston’s proposed ordinance is a good first step in shutting down party houses.
“Houston is taking the right approach in that the key here is bringing what I would call a gray economy … out of the shadows and creating some transparency and accountability in the marketplace,” he said. “These horror stories, I would argue, are the minority but they are the majority of the problems. This is all very academic until you’ve lived beside one of these, and it is a freaking nightmare.”
Platform hosts and short-term rental operators are likely to argue against regulations that could force properties to be “delisted” [to be taken off Airbnb listings], implement high liability insurance rates and massive registration fees, Coley added. They’re also inclined to say that they own these homes and pay taxes on them, therefore it’s their right to do what they want with the property, he said.
Houston could contract with a third-party provider who will “scrape” the top 100 home share platforms to ensure that advertised properties are registered with the city. Most of the short-term rental operators are corporations, so an ordinance should require an on-site emergency contact for neighbors, law enforcement and code enforcement, Coley said.
“If it’s an LLC owned by another LLC controlled by a third LLC that has investments from, you name it, China, good luck getting any kind of outcome,” he said. “Penalties for noncompliance of $100 or $500 a day, to an individual owner or operator who lives on site, that may be meaningful. It may not be meaningful at all to an investment fund with thousands of properties. You have to structure these things in such a way that you’re bringing meaningful transparency and accountability into the marketplace so you can deal with the bad actors. Over time you’re going to narrow down that bad actor pool.”
Every Houston resident should care about what’s happening with short-term rentals, Ginsburg said.
“Just because something is not happening to you right now doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you in the future, especially in Montrose and the Heights, which attract these things like fleas,” he said. “If one opens up next to you, it crushes the equity in your home. Living next to a de facto hotel, a de facto night club, without anyone monitoring it in any serious way, creates vulnerability for all of us.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
