Tuesday, February 6, 2018
The Baltimore City Council is ready to take up a bill imposing strict rules on short-term rentals that were made through Airbnb and other sites that sharply limited people’s ability to rent anything other than their homes.
This proposed legislation would be imposing the hotel tax of 9.5% on similar rentals.
The bill had been introduced on Monday by Bernard C. “Jack” Young who is the Council President and Councilman Eric Costello.
Costello said that this measure is likely to bring in nearly $800,000 a year giving the city a way to steadily shut down hosts who actually cause the problems and help make residential areas more stable.
He mentioned that short-term rentals generally transient hotels existent in residential neighborhoods.
He went on to add that they have strong neighborhoods in the city and they also have neighborhoods on the cusp in the city. Furthermore they also have weak neighborhoods that they are making efforts to bring up.
Airbnb and other platforms have emerged as a way for people to rent out spare rooms in their homes and have also become a thriving market for vacation apartment rentals, creating a new industry of people who would be owning property to rent through the sites.
This has perturbed the hotel and bed-and-breakfast industries that argue that Airbnb hosts are trying to leverage an undue advantage. However the proposed bill might positively impact the businesses of some of the many Airbnb hosts in Baltimore if it passes.
The president of the Maryland Hotel Lodging Association, Amy Rohrer said that the industry currently prioritizes on reigning in commercial operators of Airbnb.
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