San Jose doesn't possess the mixed blessing of San Francisco's ethereal beauty. People will flock to the City by the Bay no matter how expensive life here grows and no matter how poorly this place is governed. New marks are being set each day in both categories.
San Jose, meanwhile, actually has to get things done from time to time.
And so, when our neighbor to the south decided it wanted to collect hotel taxes from Airbnb and other "homesharing" services, the business of crafting legislation fell not to an elected politician but to San Jose's appointed, apolitical City Attorney and City Manager's bureaus; the resultant ordinance will be heard by the city council next week.
"We'd like to collect as much money as we can. We have places we'd like to spend it," explains San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed. The outgoing mayor says he wasn't contacted by homesharing companies and, to the best of his knowledge, neither were any of the ordinance's crafters nor the city councillors who'll vote on it. San Jose's prospective regulation, then, appears to have been created without influence from those it purports to regulate.
That's a markedly different scenario than here in San Francisco. Mayor Ed Lee, whose preferred financier Ron Conway is a major early investor in Airbnb, in 2012 urged Treasurer Jose Cisneros to not collect hotel tax on Airbnb and its ilk.
San Francisco's ordinance regulating Airbnb et al. comes with the proviso that no unit can be offered up as a short-term rental more than 90 days of the year when its resident is absent or 275 days when that resident is present. How to determine the whereabouts of a unit's residents, however, is unknown; Supervisor Jane Kim joked that ankle monitors may be required. This renders the city's ordinance unenforceable, gripe its critics (among them Planning Department officials charged with enforcing it). They pushed for a strict, 90-day yearly limit on any one unit — which would, theoretically, be enforceable.
Well, that's in the ordinance crafted by San Jose's functionaries, who ostensibly strive to write enforceable laws. Opponents of San Francisco's legislation confirm that San Jose's looks a lot like what they hoped to achieve here.
San Francisco's legislation, however, looks a lot like what other people hoped to achieve. In this city, the mayor's pal Conway and Reid Hoffman, another early Airbnb investor, dumped some $750,000 into an independent expenditure committee attacking Assembly candidate David Campos — the opponent of David Chiu, who wrote the ordinance legitimizing their business venture. City discontents have latched onto that ordinance as a potential wedge issue leading into next year's mayoral race; they've rolled out a slick website (respectsf.com) and a potential competing 2015 ballot measure.
San Francisco, as ever, is long on politics. San Jose will have to content itself with homesharing regulations that actually regulate homesharing.
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