There was good news and bad from a report last week about the city’s enforcement of licensing requirements for Airbnb hosts and other short-term rental operators.
The good news: City regulators are beefing up enforcement after years of lackluster oversight allowed mass violations of city requirements, as investigations by The Oregonian/OregonLive have found. Despite longstanding city rules for short-term rental operators to get a permit, live in the unit for most of the year and meet other requirements, hundreds or even thousands of units were flouting such provisions, the stories found. In a city with a housing shortage, the obligation to closely track, oversee and analyze short-term rentals’ impact on housing availability should be non-negotiable.
The bad news? The aggressiveness of the city’s enforcement actions apparently went from 1 to 11 — on a 10-point scale…