Short-Term Rental Ban Awaits Council Action
City Plan Commission agrees units don’t belong in neighborhoods
Residents who want short-term rentals banned from their neighborhoods are waiting to see if City Plan Commission support will prove enough to persuade the Dallas City Council.
The City Plan Commission voted 9-4 in early December in favor of only allowing short-term rentals in districts that typically allow lodging uses (not including single-family or multi-family residential districts), but council members will get the final say.
Other options include new regulations such as new registration requirements, more penalties for disruptive properties, or requiring homeowners to live in the properties they rent to paying guests.
Dallas has 1,439 active and registered short-term rentals, but city officials have identified another 1,189 properties as possible short-term rentals, said Joseph Kheir, senior data science analyst for the city of Dallas.
Cheri Gambow, a Preston Hollow area resident and president of the Walnut Ridge Neighborhood Association, said this is the first time in her 20 years of presidency that 100% of her neighbors agree on a topic.
“STRs can exist in Dallas but they don’t belong in residential neighborhoods,” Gambow said. “Simply using regulations for STRs won’t work. We do not have the code or DPD resources to handle this. We don’t have the systems in place. The city has spent three years looking at this issue, and you don’t have a solution yet.”
P. Michael Jung, one of nine commissioners who voted in favor of eliminating the short-term rentals, cited their “basic incompatibility, as a lodging use, with residential neighborhoods.”
“There was overwhelming testimony from all parts of the city about gross abuses by STRs, which the city’s code enforcement and police mechanisms are incapable of eliminating,” Jung said.
During the commission meeting, city officials said that more than 88% of short-term rentals generated zero 311 or 911 calls, and only 4.6% of properties generated two or more.
However, neighbors shared that these homes could cause disturbances without warranting a call to the police department.
Kedra Flowers, a short-term rental operator who has two properties in Preston Hollow, told People Newspapers that if Dallas bans short-term rentals, she believes they would still exist but through unmonitored, illegal means, like social media.
“There’s literally nothing that’s going to verify who they’re going to rent those properties to,” Flowers said. “With Airbnb, I’ve had people that wanted to rent my property offline, and I said, ‘No, I only go through Airbnb or VRBO,’ and they couldn’t get an Airbnb account because they had a prior felony.”
Flowers also emphasized the importance of background checks through registered websites to keep both homeowners and neighbors safe.
Brent M. Rubin, one of four commission members who voted against the measure, shared a similar sentiment during the meeting: “The bad operators will continue to operate, and it’ll be the good operators who go away.”
Commissioner Tipton Housewright, who also voted against the measure, said they “owe it to our citizens to have a little bit more nuance and have a multifaceted approach,” instead of banning short-term rentals across the board.
