A little over a month after San Francisco’s comprehensive home-sharing law went into effect, the City is already encountering a problem that threatens the effectiveness of the measure. The law, which allows residents to rent out their homes as long as they live in them for at least nine months out of the year and register with the City, is running up against the simple fact that it is incredibly difficult to enforce.
For one thing, to enforce the law, the City needs access to booking data from sites operating in its jurisdiction — the sort of information that Airbnb has been reticent to provide elsewhere. Without that data, it is virtually impossible for the City to make sure that all rentals are registered, and there is no clear way to track down violators who have declined to register with the City. Additionally, the law indicates an owner can only rent their home during periods when they are not present for 90 days in a calendar year, but there is no clear way to prove whether an owner is present during any given period.
The Planning Department is now asking for additional funding to administer the law, and officials are proposing ways to strengthen its effectiveness, including requiring Airbnb to share its booking data with the City. Yet these issues spotlight the various difficulties inherent in attempting to regulate online vacation rental markets. A regulation is only as strong as a local agency’s ability to enforce it, and without exact data about who is renting, for how long, and whether they are present on the premises at the time, enforcement of even a strong regulatory framework like San Francisco’s can be immediately frustrated.
Some of these problems, like the issue of homeowners who rent their homes without registering them with the City, would be solved if Airbnb agreed to share data with local governments. Others, like who is at home during the recorded rentals, are much more intractable. Whether Airbnb is willing to share the records is an open question. In some cases, it is uncertain whether it can share them. For example, in New York City, a group of citizens sued Airbnb to keep their data private, and while Airbnb eventually released records in compliance with a subpoena, those records were anonymized until the attorney general identified hosts as worthy of investigating. Without those records, San Francisco’s efforts to control the online vacation rental markets that operate within its jurisdiction may be hampered in their effectiveness, leaving the next step for cities hoping to exercise control over this emerging marketplace an open question.
