A map of short-term rental licenses issued in the Uptown area. More than 4,500 licenses have been issued in the city. (via city of New Orleans)
The City Planning Commission will hold its first public hearing Tuesday afternoon as it considers reforms to the city’s laws allowing short-term rentals like AirBnB, and expects to issue recommendations based on those comments and its own research this summer.
The hearing will be held during the City Planning Commission’s meeting on Tuesday, April 24. The meeting begins at 1:30 p.m. in the City Council chambers, but the commission will not begin the hearing on short-term rentals until 3 p.m.
The planning commission is starting the the study at the direction of the New Orleans City Council, whose members voted last month for the commission to re-evaluate the effects of legalizing short-term rentals now that the regulations are in their second year. The planning commission is charged with analyzing the current laws in New Orleans, as well as any other newer strategies for handling AirBnB and similar platforms adopted by other cities in the past two years.
The City Council is giving the commission staff wide latitude in the issues it should consider. One of them — the requirement of a homestead exemption for any short-term rental in residential neighborhoods — was originally supposed by three council members: Susan Guidry, LaToya Cantrell and Jared Brossett.
Though it did not muster a fourth vote to be included in the original ordinance, Guidry has continued to argue even as recently as this week that the homestead exemption requirement is crucial to protecting residential quality of life from the incursion and proliferation of lodging businesses masquerading as homes.
Among the other possible changes to be studied are limits on the number of short-term rentals per block or per neighborhood, minimum distances between rentals, changes to the license structure, fees, and enforcement mechanisms.
Following Tuesday’s hearing, the commission will also receive written comments on the issue until July. On July 3, the City Planning staff expects to make their report public, and the full City Planning Commission will take it up at a meeting July 10. The commission’s recommendation on the study will then be forwarded to the full City Council for consideration.
If the City Council decides to adopt the commission’s recommendations, it will likely launch a new process back with the City Planning Commission later this year. The commission will be ordered to draft formal amendments for each policy change to city laws, and those amendments will then receive their own public hearings prior to a final decision by the City Council.
The new mayor and City Council members will be sworn in May 7, so the decisions on new changes will be left to them. Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell supported some of the reforms being considered now when the ordinance was first passed, and incoming City Councilmen Joe Giarrusso III and Jay H. Banks have both said they expect a majority of the new City Council to treat the issue as one it should deal with quickly.
