This week I attended a Host2Host meetup with speaker Marshall Runkel, Chief of Staff for Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. The meeting was given to provide short term rental hosts with information regarding the policy changes that are proposed for STR's in Portland, Oregon. 

The following information was provided by Debi Hertert who is one of the founders of Host2Host (link below), and was posted on the Portland Area Airbnb Hosts Facebook group. We'll see how this actually all pans out, and I'll be posting here on this blog as I get more information. 

Host2Host: https://host2host.wildapricot.org/

Portland Area Airbnb Hosts Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/PortlandAreaAirbnbHosts/

PROPOSED POLICY CHANGES from Portland’s City Hall: How Will They Impact You?

Marshall Runkel, Chief of Staff for Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly

March 14, 2018 Host2Host Meetup Summary

With a crowd of 58 people slightly overfilling the room at the Kennedy School, and Tom Miller moderating Q&A, Marshall Runkel spent nearly two hours interacting with our audience. Marshall is one of the key people in Portland government responsible for revising the short-term rental regulations and “wants to get it right”. He encouraged us to not be distracted by newspaper stories hyping up discord between the City and the short-term rental platforms or hosts: “It’s rooms like this where the real work gets done”. Midway through the meeting, he told the audience “People on City Council want to hear from you. I guarantee that no one on City Council wants to screw this up”

Some details were provided (but even these included an 80% confidence caveat). Here are the main points that were covered:

The legal settlement between the City and HomeAway included language providing for the platform to pass through host registration information and unspecified other data to the City. The settlement included the City dropping mandatory inspections.

When pressed, Marshall said that of all the proposed changes, the only part he felt was essentially “done” is the pass-through of data and dropping the mandatory inspections. Everything else was on the table.

Under the proposed changes, hosts would self-certify that specific safety requirements are met. The platform would pass through at least basic registration information, and there is a goal that this be a global solution that covers all platforms. It was not clear whether the permit number would be issued to the platform by the City, or generated by the platform. It was not clear whether hosts would have to self-certify through each platform.

The City’s principal concern is to identify and remove commercial operations, which he described as those homes that are not the principal residence of the owner and are rented out more than 9 months per year. Those listings, in his view are hurting other hosts and hurting the supply of long-term rental housing.

The upcoming changes include a new fee structure.

The latest figure Marshall had heard was *$4/night* additional, but he clearly didn’t want to be pinned down on this subject that is being discussed by other departments. He even asked people taking notes to put an asterisk next to this meaning “I’m not sure”.

Tom said that in addition to the proposed dollars/night occupancy tax increase that would go to the affordable housing fund, we had heard the proposal included a two percent increase that would go to Travel Portland, bringing us to the same percentage being paid by the largest hotels. Under the current proposal, Tom said, hotels under 50 rooms would continue to be taxed at the lower rate that has been charged to us, and they would not see the higher charges.

This was unpopular with the audience, and again, Marshall recommended we form an advocacy group to meet with City policy staff.

With regard to the dollars/night portion, it was brought up by attendees that this is a regressive form of tax on both hosts and guests at the lower end of the rental cost spectrum. Tom told the audience that he had requested the documentation showing the total STR occupancy tax contribution for 2017 three weeks ago and has not yet seen the information.

Timeline: Marshall expects this to go to City Council in early summer, and that inspections would continue on until then, but emphasized that both the timeline and the inspection process may not turn out the way he’s expecting at this time.

Marshall described the regulations as “outdated” when asked why hosts were not allowed to have a home business, especially those businesses that do not adversely affect the neighborhood, and invited our input. This theme repeated when he was asked about getting rid of the requirement to record license plate numbers.

Several people questioned exactly what data would be passed through to the City by the platforms, and Marshall declined to speculate, other than to say the minimum name, address and self-certification to enforce the one-host-one-address rule.

He also brought up an example of the City being able to verify that an ADU built under waived system development fees was not being used for short-term rentals, if the rules at the time required the ADU to be used only for long-term rentals.

H2H OUTCOME: We are rapidly in the process of forming the advocacy group so that hosts can affect the policy making as it happens. A more detailed report will be in our first newsletter, with a launch date of April 1.