Commentary: County must stop approving vacation rentals

If you happen to live in Sonoma Valley close to the town of Sonoma but still in the county, such as along Leveroni Road (where there are many small quiet side streets and rural cul de sacs), you may have noticed an unbelievable surge in short-term vacation rentals. This surge started around the same time as the COVID surge — when many of us had to endure clandestine weddings and increased vacation rental usage by groups looking to escape San Francisco and New York during lock-down, even when shelter in place was mandated for our county.

Complaints lodged to the authority charged with managing and administering short-term vacation rentals — Sonoma County Permit and Resource Management Department (PRMD or Permit Sonoma) — yielded no results. An interesting footnote is that in Sonoma County, not a single short-term vacation rental permit has ever been revoked. It’s not for lack of evidence or reports to the proper channels. Worse by far is that the only policing of these properties that happens is placed on our shoulders, the unfortunate neighbors, and that not only makes you very unpopular but creates significant tension between households.

Why is this becoming such a problem now? Over the last two years, the many short-term vacation rental owners live mostly out-of-town and seem to be investing in multiple properties here in town. Housing in Sonoma Valley has changed from mere shelter — a necessity — to an investment vehicle on par with stocks, bonds and cryptocurrency for wealthy out-of-towners.

My husband and I love our community and our neighborhood but already 30% of the homes in our small 16-home cul-de-sac are short-term vacation rentals. We have noticed how it’s changed the character of our neighborhood. We fear that we will soon be a street of small hotels as we are so very close to the town.

We now have a cavalcade of cars and visitors who are unknown to us traveling down our street at all hours and with little care that they are in a residential neighborhood. We are forced to complain to a remote entity to get noise abated or parties turned down a notch, to little or no result.

We are in the midst of a megadrought. The stresses and strains on both our water and electrical infrastructure are well documented. We cannot afford multiple homes hosting 10 to 12 people in super party mode — running showers, filling pools and doing massive amounts of laundry, multiple times a week. While our neighborhood is on wells this level of use impacts the total water table and by extension infringes on our overall water supply significantly. Moreover this is happening in multiple locations in town every week throughout the spring, summer and fall. This level of consumption is simply irresponsible and unsustainable.

Is the TOT (transient occupancy tax) so valuable that it can’t be made up by the hotels that also pay TOT (there are two just half mile away)? If these are businesses, they should at least be forced to have business licenses and face real consequences when they break the rules.

Given our need to keep all neighbors vigilant on fire safety and possible evacuation, I found myself recently explaining to the new San Mateo-based homeowner of a five-bedroom short-term vacation rental next door as to why using the fire pit during a mega drought wasn’t recommended.

Who represents us? We long to be in the town of Sonoma (we are one block away) which values neighborhoods by keeping out these vacation rentals. Instead, we are under the aegis of a county that has no idea how destructive it is to our neighborhoods when they permit, with abandon, these “small hotels.” If these short-term vacation investors want to be in the hotel business, then invest in one of the many that we have in our community that could use some investment money. And no, we’re not begrudging the room rentals that some do to defray the cost of their home as hosted rentals which were initially the spirit of AirBnB, where you can experience a community through the eyes of a local.

We don’t think that Sonoma County PRMD should be in the business of granting permission to anyone who wants to set up a hotel business in a neighborhood. And asking us to pay and beg for exclusion zones seems like an inappropriate pay-for-play model. Do we want to become Palm Springs? If you live outside the town of Sonoma (even a block over) you have come to expect that your neighbors will now be hoteliers who don’t even live in the community.

Celia Canfield is a longtime Valley resident.