H-13 Correspondence – Allan Crawford
Honorable Mayor and City Council,
Long Beach is experiencing unprecedented housing shortages, monstrous rent increases and soaring home prices. Yet the city Staff recommends allowing up to 350 owner-unoccupied short-term- rental units in our coastal area, which will remove space for full-time residents. I encourage you to oppose this measure.
We have no shortage of space for visitors. We have an abundance of hotel rooms that are waiting to be occupied. Additionally, the City has allocated up to 800 short term rental units. It is unfathomable that we would allocate more of this valuable space to short term rental units. This not only removes units from the rental and sales market, it also pushes rents and sales prices higher. The ones who benefit are most often out of town investors, who have no concern for our great City. And to top it off we want to prevent property owners from restricting short term rental use in multi family units.
Other cities are headed the other direction. Cities are encouraging, and even offering up front financial incentives, for owners to deed restrict their properties, prohibiting them to be used as an STR. They are prohibiting properties to be used as an STR for one to two years after initial purchase. They are severely restricting the number of STR’s, all to preserve local housing
I strongly encourage the council to support our local residents by working to increase the number properties that are available for local housing by voting against this Ill-concieved ordinance
Regards
Allan Crawford
Long Beach resident
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