One man's trash is another man's treasure, as the saying goes. Likewise, how you see short term rentals depends on your perception, needs, and experiences. Is it really a blight on a neighborhood like some people think, an infestation that will grow and take over the tranquil streets, destroying our sense of community? Or is it really a blessing that those who fear the world and the strangers in it can’t fathom? To the family man who has been downsized, finding a stranger willing to pay to stay in the unused guest room can be what keeps his family from losing their home while he searches for a new job. For a mom looking for a place her son can live during his summer internship in a city far away, finding another mom in that city to welcome him into her home and agree to include him in the family meals can seem like nothing short of a miracle. Parents who want their children to grow up with compassion and love for other cultures may jump at the chance to host foreigners so their children learn that while we may dress, and eat, and talk differently, we are all part of the human race. At the end of the day, we are all trying to figure out how to put food on the table, raise our children to be healthy and happy, face the death of our parents with grace and dignity, and find enough hours in the day to keep the house clean, hold onto friendships, and find something akin to meaning and purpose, or at least keep wanting to look for it. To these people and many others, short term rentals are a blessing.
But this idea of "sharing" and even earning income on the things we don't use all the time is a new idea. Well, truth be told it is an old idea. In an agricultural society, it was not uncommon for neighbors to share their resources. Neighbors counted on one another when they couldn't do something themselves. They rallied together to thrash Raymond’'s pecan trees or to help shell Othell's overflowing crop of sweet peas. There was no insurance then - not for common folk anyway. When your barn burned down, it was your neighbors who came and helped you rebuild it. If you fell on hard times, neighbors would help out however they could. People didn't move around as much then so it was easy to identify "us" and "them." If you had been there 30 years, you were an us. If you hadn't, you were a them. Caution about those who didn't belong was wise. Folks who didn’t bloom where they were planted may have come from bad seeds. But times changed, as they have a way of doing. The drought in ’51 changed small town farm life in Texas forever, forcing farmers to the cities and beginning the end of the "original" sharing economy in our state.
Credit cards, insurance, literacy, mobility, the ability to communicate across long-distances - all these things extracted a price from that small town society until few people were left in those small towns. We all moved to the city. Built houses in the suburbs. Got cable. Worried a little less about knowing all our neighbors because insurance would rebuild that barn, not your neighbors. And if you got in a financial jam, you could put something on the credit card instead of asking someone to loan you the money. Not only did many of us lose our sense of community, our "us," but almost simultaneously news became immediate and constant. We didn't just hear about the "bad apple" in our town or the next town over. We heard about bad apples everywhere. How do we identify "us" and "them" in a world that is entirely connected? It gets tricky. But it is innate in our nature – this need to identify who we belong with and who we don’t.
So now in the midst of all this communication and all this separation, in a country where most of us have surplus income and relatively unused assets, someone realized we could use the internet to connect those with needs to those with excess. It might not have ever taken off if it didn't appear as our country was suffering a housing market crash followed by a recession. People were willing to do anything, even something as crazy as looking at someone's online profile and inviting them into their home. Strangers. What those brave and/or desperate souls found out was that it wasn't so crazy. Sure, there are bad folks in the world and you’ve got to watch out for them. But the truth is the majority of people in this world are good. The early internet hosting cites touted a reference system that hearkened back to an age of being able to call a neighbor and ask what they knew about someone else in town. References can tell you a lot about someone just like talking to a friend of theirs can. Read 50 or more references and you know who you are meeting long before you meet them. It helped that more and more people were meeting their spouse through online dating. That seemed like a crazy idea when eHarmony began in 2000. Now 1 in 5 marriages began with two strangers looking at each other’s computer profiles.
But Short Term Rentals (STRs) have a dark side, as do all things associated with humanity. It is human nature to be conscious of the impression we make on others. When that impression is short-lived, we care less about it. We may spend hours on a business presentation to impress our boss but drive that rental mustang into the ground during the business trip. We are freer on vacation, in part, because no one we know is around to judge us or hold us to our own standards of being. It can be hard to do the "right" thing when we know no one is looking, we can't be caught, and if we were, no one we know would ever know. Some of us have a moral compass that keeps us pretty close to center whether others are watching or not. Some of us do not. Either kind of person can show up as a guest, tenant, or neighbor in the house next door. The tenant and neighbor must continue to live there so they have the added social pressure of conformity. But the STR guest is leaving in a day or a week. They might just not care who they affect. Loud parties, careless parking, intentional or inadvertent rule violations, comings and goings at all hours of the day and night. It can all happen. To those who live next door to these places, STRs are not a blessing, they are a blight. These are strangers in our neighborhood, people we've never met before, people who the homeowner has never met, disrupting the harmony of our neighborhood. If a blight grows out of control it can destroy everything around it. So the urge to chop it off at the root is understandable. It gets rid of the problem entirely. But it also gets rid of whatever was growing in that space. The man whose home was saved, the woman whose son was safe, the child who grows up to be one more compassionate soul on this earth.
The majority of STR issues have arisen when hosts are renting out the entire home. When a homeowner is inviting someone into their home, sharing space with them, it is different. They have their own safety to consider and that of their family. They are more likely to read profiles, check references, ask for verification. After all, they are inviting strangers into their home, trusting another with all that they own, even their very life. The Texas Supreme Court held that the Residential Purpose Clause in HOAs didn't prohibit short term boarders in 1951. It took until 2018 to hold it didn't prohibit short term whole-house rentals, and then on the heels of a legislative push back against the abuse of power by HOAs throughout the state.
Any debate that pits one side against another with each taking a black and white perspective – it is all good or all bad – is missing something. Humanity by its nature is flawed. We all have light sides and shadow sides. Most of us spend this life, hopefully, trying to embrace and live in the light. Some of us don't know how to get out of the dark. Everything we create will be comprised of both because we are comprised of both. If you see a blemish on a plum tree leaf and you pull out the tree. You've lost. If you see 100 on every leaf and you leave the tree, you'll lose the orchard. There is a balance. A balance that can only be found through open discussion and exchange. By looking through the eyes of that unemployed man or worried mother for just a moment. Or looking through the eyes of that person who had to tolerate blaring rock music until four in the morning every football weekend.
The real solutions, the ones that work, the ones that make the world better, that make a neighborhood a community, are born of a willingness to shift perspective and find the common ground that most, if not all of us can agree on. If someone tells you that can’t happen, remember to keep that person in your prayers or thoughts. It is a sad thing to lose faith in our fellow man, and that person lives with a tortured soul.
But to find common ground people must come together, engage, talk, share stories. THAT is what community is about. They discuss in the open, listen with curiosity, consider both sides and try to find a true compromise. When people can do this, the solutions become "wins" for both sides. A true win-win. A glance at our political landscape will tell you how well the I'm-right-you're-wrong dichotomy is serving us. You can change the macrocosm by changing the microcosm. Maybe here at home we could embrace a different way? Maybe we could put our judgments down for a while, ask for the facts, and listen to the stories and experiences of others. People who create division want power. Divide and conquer is the oldest strategy in the war book. People who discuss in the shadows aren't looking for solutions, they're looking to have their way.
As homeowners we owe each other respect. And that means not only mowing our yards and taking up our trash bins, it means respect for one another, for our opinions, ideas, and experiences. As a community, we owe each other a willingness to come together, to find a win-win solution, to believe in one another and our ability to share and show and receive compassion. If you are convinced STR's are evil and a blight that should be stamped out at the root, but you've never lived next to one and never spoken to someone who hosts about why they host, maybe you should ask yourself where you got such a black and white view of this issue? Is it the same bad apple story told again and again and again until you think the whole bunch was spoiled but really it was just one bad apple? Shouldn't you know the answer to that question BEFORE you take away the lifeline between owners and their homes in some future market crash? If there really are a hundred bad apples in our neighborhood, shouldn't you know THAT before you vote no? If we don't know those answers, what are we basing our votes on? We don’t know if we have a blight or a situation that just needs a little pruning.
The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this article is that STRs are neither a blessing or a blight. They are both. If we work together instead of trying to control one another, we could find ways to honor the blessing and eradicate the blight. Isn't THAT what a community should be all about? That's the kind of community I'd sure like to be living in. Wouldn't you?