Hello guys, just wondering if any of you know any real-life examples of law that was maybe designed by citizens to stop government/cities from regulating/limiting short-term rentals preemptively?
Only sovereign citizens have these strawman laws. None have been successful.
@Giorgi what nation are you hosting in? I can’t recall but it seems it’s not the US? As I told someone here recently, there are over 87,000 governments in the US that could potentially regulate STRs due to the structure of our federal system.
Regardless, I doubt that stopping government regulation of STR is going to be possible.
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Why would it be in a government’s interest to pass such a law @Giorgi
Citizens don’t design laws. Government’s do.
I don’t know about “citizens” but the state of Texas passed a law prohibiting cities from regulating STRs. Legislature, not an initiative, which is apparently what you’re looking for.
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Yeah, something like that. But it seems Texas simply removed ability for cities to regulate and gave that power to State itself.
in Georgia. I am just looking at other countries experience with that. Of course with sufficient lobbing from hotel industry any law can be overridden but I am interested if it can be made somewhat difficult
I haven’t heard of such a law. The US used to be one of the friendlier nations to things like citizen initiatives. However the direction is in more regulation, not less, in most places. For example in a New Jersey city they had vote on Airbnb regulations and despite Airbnb’s intense lobbying, the proposal passed with a 69% vote.
In Texas, where I live, the legislature did indeed remove the cities right to regulate Airbnb. So the stricter regulations in Austin were removed. But you are correct that the legislature keeps the power for itself, the citizens didn’t get anything.
The initiative power differs greatly from state to state, and it’s strongest in the West. California and Washington especially. The problem with initiatives is that they can trigger a lot of spending from those who would be regulated (like hotels!). So it could backfire and you could instead trigger more regulation and even worse the negative advertising from corporate spenders could result in lower bookings.