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Home My WebLink About12-19-22 Public Comment - J. Polasik - Fw_ Short term rentalsFrom:Terry Cunningham To:Agenda Subject:Fw: Short term rentals Date:Monday, December 19, 2022 7:27:30 AM For visibility Terry Cunningham - City Commissioner City of Bozeman | 121 North Rouse Avenue | P.O. Box 1230 | Bozeman, MT 59771 P: 406.595-3295 | E: Tcunningham@bozeman.net | W: www.bozeman.net From: Joe Polasik <polasik@gmail.com> Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2022 4:41 PM To: Terry Cunningham <TCunningham@BOZEMAN.NET> Subject: Re: Short term rentals CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Thanks Terry! Saw somethings in the Chronical and on the news recently about short term rentals butunfortunately they aren't reporting the full picture. I understand the problem with housing in the area and the need to look at all solutions to solve. Eyeing 500 short term rentals and assuming they can get all those converted to long termhousing is naive. Yes some of them may convert but many will not. Many of these are businesses that local people have set up with a purpose and changing that can affect them indifferent ways adversely. We have a ADU short term rental here on South Rouse and changing this would affect us financially as we are counting on the increased income of the short term rental to be able toafford our mortgage on the entire home. The rental rate we would have to get on long term wouldn't be feasible for renters and lowering would likely cause us to look at other housingoptions. We built the ADU on our property with the specific reason to make it a short term rental. This was so that we could afford to pay for a mortgage on the property and repair the roof, sidingand other major problems. This would not have happened if we could not do the STR and this unit would not exist as a rental at all. We also do short term so our family/friends can staywith us when they come to visit and rent as short term when they are not here. We could not do this with a long term renter and would either would have not built at all or just added on toour house if we could have afforded it. I assume others are in the same boat. It is not as simple as stating a ban on STR would automatically make 500 units available for housing. Many would not even be on the STRmarket to begin with and I would expect several would be removed from the rental market all together as they would no longer be able to use them themselves. Bozeman Tenants Unitedand HRDC are making broad statements and eying units they see could potentially have people in them without knowing if that would actually happen and how it would affect localresidents who are depending this type of income. Yes, investment groups should not be buying up our properties to converting them into short term AND long term rentals. I would be interested to know how many of the 500 are actuallyowned by investment groups vs local residents. City code already bans short term rentals is most city zones, unless the owner of the home lives on the property as well. Some have beengrandfathered in but this would lead me to believe that most current and all of the new short term rentals are actually owned by residents. Or in business zones that allow for rentals andhotels of all sorts. Demonizing local city residents for something that has already been addressed in code is not helping the housing problem and focusing on ALL sources of the problem will have a bettereffect than trying to fix things after the fact. Here are the questions I would ask: Would they tell a hotel chain in town that they are no longer able to rent short term and arerequired to house people long term? This is essentially what they are asking just a smaller scale. People are also visiting the the area anyway. Would they rather they stay in hotel chain ownedby out of state companies or in locally owned STRs that hire local work force at much higher rates and invest directly into the local economy? We pay our cleaner $60/hr vs near minimumwage at a hotel. This job wouldn't exist if it was a long term unit. We also hire local small businesses to help build and maintain the property. Outside of city limits there are no restrictions which could be causing more of an issue than inthe city. Would it be better to focus on this since there is a large quantity of STRs the that may not have owners living in the area since code doesn't require it? How many of the long term rentals in Bozeman are owned by out of state investors? Longterm rentals have poor maintenance records and and are raising rents. They are also driving up prices due to larger buying power which leave local residents less likely to be able to fundthier own homes in the future. Why is this not a bigger issue and is it something that can be addressed? There are also many, many condos/houses that are vacant 95% of the time owned by wealthyout of staters removing them from the house market all together. Is this not a much bigger problem? They are driving up prices and their homes are going mostly unused when we reallyneed housing in the area. If the vacant homes were all currently available for local residents to buy/rent we would likely not have a problem at all do to the quantity or these out there. Why aren't we seeing headlines like these? "Bozeman Needs Homes not Vacant Over Priced Homes.""Bozeman Need Locally Owned Rentals." "Gallatin County Needs to Review Short Term Rental Regulations." Thank you for your time and consideration, Joe On Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 10:01 Terry Cunningham <TCunningham@bozeman.net> wrote: Joe: Thank you for reaching out. My email is tcunningham@bozeman.net Sent from my iPhone On Dec 15, 2022, at 7:45 AM, City of Bozeman, MT<webadmin@bozeman.net> wrote: Message submitted from the <City Of Bozeman> website. Site Visitor Name: Joe polasikSite Visitor Email: polasik@gmail.com Terry can you send me your email address. I have a statement on this subject Iwould like to send you. Thanks, Joe City of Bozeman emails are subject to the Right to Know provisions of Montana’s Constitution (Art. II, Sect. 9) and may be considered a “public record” pursuant to Title 2, Chpt. 6, Montana Code Annotated. As such, this email, its sender and receiver, and the contents may be available for public disclosure and will be retained pursuant to the City’s record retention policies. Emails that contain confidential information such as information related to individual privacy may be protected from disclosure under law.