Volcanic Ash: All talk, no political spine in controlling illegal vacation rentals in Hawaii

The scuffle over vacation rentals that’s consumed both the Legislature and Honolulu Hale this year is an example of everything wrong with Hawaii’s approach to problem solving.

Time after time, our elected officials fail to address obvious concerns when they are in their beginning stages and still manageable.

Then the problems grow out of control from years of neglect, competing community and economic interests harden their battle lines and solutions become as daunting as putting Humpty Dumpty together again.

This dynamic has brought us endless wheel-spinning on other thorny issues from the crumbling Waikiki Natatorium to a future Oahu landfill site to the public worker pension debt.

With vacation rentals, the seeds of the crisis were planted in 1989 when the city stopped issuing permits for what were then mostly small-scale residential bed-and-breakfasts — without policies to enforce the rules going forward.

As a result, now on Oahu there are only 816 legal vacation rentals outside of resort areas, but some 8,000 illegal units.

Owner-occupied B&Bs have mostly given way to whole-house rentals without owner presence. With the ease of renting at premium prices through online platforms like Airbnb, many Oahu homes have been scooped up by outside speculators who see an easy buck.

It’s disrupted once-tranquil neighborhoods, exacerbated traffic and parking problems, and contributed to the island’s housing shortage by taking sorely needed residential rental units off the market.

At the same time, the official blind eye has brought local homeowners extra income to survive Hawaii’s high cost of living and created a thriving economy of eateries, specialty shops and services that cater to the illegal rentals.

So lawmakers who ducked the problem for 30 years are now faced with either throttling down vacation rentals at significant economic loss or further sacrificing our quality of life to illegal tourism run amok.

The Legislature chose the latter with its bill to let companies like Airbnb anonymously collect state taxes from illegal rentals, tacitly sanctioning violations of county zoning for the tax rake.

The City Council, after months of hearings and promises of action, froze last week under the pressure from vacation rental interests and deferred bills to prohibit whole-home transient rentals, allow limited rental permits for owner-occupants and set steep fines for violators.

Solutions that are far more difficult today than they would have been in 1989 become still more difficult the longer we delay taking control of our island’s land use.

There are tools to fix this — zoning laws to specify where vacation rentals can be and how many, aggressive enforcement to root out scofflaws and smartly targeted property taxes to make transient rentals less financially attractive.

All that’s missing is the political backbone to make the hard choices.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.