Bill Hocker | Nov 5, 2015

LA Times 11/05/15: Airbnb wins a battle in San Francisco but is still facing a war
NVR 10/21/15: City Council moves closer to Airbnb-style vacation rentals
NVR 10/18/15: Permits for Airbnb-style room rentals to come before Napa council
NVR 9/7/15: Questions remain about short term rentals
NVR 9/4/15: Napa planners support Airbnb-type home rental ordinance
NVR 1/17/15: Clarifying remarks on Napa vacation rentals
NVR 1/15/15: Napa hosts debate on allowing more vacation rentals
NVR 1/9/15: Napa plans study session to expand vacation rentals

Reading some of the comments is pretty depressing. Everyone wants to be on the tourism bandwagon. The county gets its TOT. Homes become mini hotels earning much more than they can from regular rentals. Home owners seeking a better place to live get a boost in the resale value. The only loss is the life of a real community with affordable housing and places that people actually want to live. The residents can now afford to move to Oregon where real life still exists. The city doesn't seem to see any downside to the unquestioned embrace of tourism as their reason for being. The Butler Report is here.

St. Helena, by contrast, has apparently gone cold turkey from a TOT addiction and realized that maintaining a real community in the Napa Valley is not easy, but worth doing. FIrst they killed small wineries in the neighborhoods and now neighborhood hotels. The latest on the battle in St. Helena is here.

This is a part of what the battle of the last couple of years has been about. Does this place survive as a real community with its distinct agricultural, small town, rural character only made possible in an urban world by its famous agricultural export? Or does it become a good-life shopping mall and theme park, an expansion of the definition of agriculture that needs no real community life in support and is run by absentee landlords, estate owners and corporations.

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