After years of playing nice with vacation rental website Airbnb, Portland is gearing up to play hardball.
Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office is readying an ordinance that would ban Airbnb and similar platforms from advertising or receiving a fee from unpermitted vacation rentals.
The ordinance would turn up the heat on Airbnb after years of back-and-forth over whether Airbnb should turn over its list of hosts.
Regulators say as many as 70% of those hosts haven’t secured a permit to run a vacation rental in Portland. The city wants Airbnb’s list to help it track down scofflaws.
Airbnb already collects local lodging taxes on behalf of its Portland hosts. The city’s main concern is that illegal rentals in residential areas might eat up housing that could otherwise go to long-term residents, pushing the city’s housing prices even higher.
The city has been negotiating with Airbnb for more than a year on a framework for sharing its list. But the talks have come to an impasse, according to a resolution prepared by the mayor’s office. The company’s latest offer was a step backward, the resolution says.
The ordinance proposed would require Airbnb to limit its Portland listings to those included on a public registry of permitted short-term rentals, or else agree to provide the city with information on all its hosts.
In a statement, Airbnb didn’t directly address the ordinance or the city’s allegation that the company walked back from a deal: “Portland’s registration process continues to be difficult and so we appreciate the city’s efforts to try and streamline the process and remain committed to working closely with officials to make this happen.”
The approach replicates that of Santa Monica, California, which survived a legal challenge in federal court earlier this year.
Host2Host, an association of 250 homeowners who operate short-term rentals in Portland, generally supports the measure, saying hosts who aren’t playing by the rules reflect poorly on the rest.
What’s more, said Rob Hertert, a founder of the organization, they undercut the city’s efforts to limit the effect of short-term rentals on housing costs.
“The regulations in Portland minimize that, but they have to be able to enforce it,” Hertert said. “We’re to the point now where it’s hard to see how the policies can be enforced.”
Portland has maintained a relatively friendly relationship with Airbnb even as the city sparred with the company’s competitors.
Airbnb in 2014 announced plans to open an office with hundreds of employees in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown, with then-Mayor Charlie Hales highlighting the move in his state of the city address.
Later that year, the Portland City Council legalized Airbnb’s business model, for the first time allowing short-term rentals in private homes.
Soon after, the city signed an agreement with Airbnb for the company to collect and pay lodging taxes on its behalf of its hosts. Both hailed the agreements a model of cooperation.
In 2015, the city started trading lawsuits with Airbnb’s biggest competitor, HomeAway, which declined to collect lodging taxes for its customers.
But a 2018 settlement with HomeAway appears to have put city’s relationship with Airbnb on the rocks.
HomeAway agreed to share its roster of hosts with the city to aid in collecting taxes and ensuring the rentals are permitted, but only when Airbnb did the same.
That set off a year of negotiations with Airbnb, which the city says have proved fruitless. The company has declined to remove unpermitted listings and insisted on limiting what the user data can be used for, according to the resolution prepared by Wheeler’s office.
Even as it’s enjoyed a cordial relationship with Portland’s city government, Airbnb has clashed with cities around the globe over strict short-term rental policies. The company sued Boston last year over the city’s regulations requiring the company to police its own listings and share information about its users with the city. This year, Paris said it would sue Airbnb over hundreds of illegal listings.
Airbnb, headquartered in San Francisco, has a potentially pivotal year ahead. The company’s chief executive has said it’s preparing for an initial public offering.
Selling shares on the stock market could make its founders, early employees and investors a lot of money — but it could also expose the company to much greater public scrutiny, both in the lead-up to the offering and in subsequent regulatory disclosures.
-- Elliot Njus and Gordon Friedman
enjus@oregonian.com; 503-294-5034; @enjus
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