Oakland Park Perspectives with Anthony Niedwiecki

The city had an item on its agenda this past week that would have limited short term rentals in single family neighborhoods. The proposal would have prevented residents from renting their homes for less than 90 days. I spoke against this proposed ordinance at the meeting, and the commission held off on deciding the issue.

I opposed this proposal because I think it tries to correct a problem that can be fixed with existing laws. The idea first surfaced after complaints were made about some loud and unruly college students who were renting a house for spring break. Some on the commission wanted to know if it was possible to limit these types of rentals.

The city came back with a proposal that would prohibit renting a house for less than 90 days. In my speech, I raised how the proposal would have an extremely negative impact on residents throughout the city at a time when many are already struggling with making ends meet. The proposal went way too far in addressing the problem with loud and unruly renters.

I also discussed how the proposed ordinance raised so many questions. For example,

– Does this mean that residents will be unable to rent out their homes on a month to month basis, a common practice everywhere?
– Does this mean that residents can’t rent out their homes during peak winter season if it is only for a couple of months?
– Does it mean that someone cannot rent out a room for a short period of time to help make ends meet or even prevent foreclosure?

I personally would rather see a house rented out, even for a short period of time, than see it go empty and become run down, something becoming too common because of foreclosures. If the problems we are trying to address are “noise, unruly behavior, and other disturbances,” as the city stated in its report, shouldn’t we use the existing ordinances to take care of those issues instead of taking away our property rights and increasing the potential for foreclosures?

I understand the need to keep the feel of our single family neighborhoods and improve the quality of life of our residents. In fact, we recently faced some issues on my street where there were large groups of kids at a house being rented who caused noise problems and interfered with cars going down the street. To address the problem, we didn’t propose a new ordinance. Instead, we worked with the sheriff’s office and used existing laws, and the problems have been fixed.

The same should happen here. Instead of passing an overbroad ordinance to punish homeowners, I urged the city to enforce the laws we have. If the occupants are engaged in unruly behavior, the police should and will respond. If the noise is too loud, enforce our new noise ordinance. If the house is in disrepair, bring in code enforcement.

We already have the tools to manage the problems that this ordinance was trying to address. We should avoid taking steps that could hurt people who are already struggling in this city during these hard economic times with an overbroad and unnecessary law. We should first look for ways to manage our problems with the laws we already have on the books before thinking about creating any new ones.

The commissioners decided not to go forward with this issue, so it is dead for now. So it was a small victory for residential property rights. I will let you know if it comes back to the commission.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Oakland Park, Politics, foreclosure, housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.