Bill Hocker | Sep 7, 2015

NVR: Napa planners support Airbnb-type home rental ordinance
NVR: Questions remain about short term rentals
NVR: Napa plans study session to expand vacation rentals
NVR: Napa hosts debate on allowing more vacation rentals
NVR: Clarifying remarks on Napa vacation rentals


It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that the money to be made from short-term home and room rentals to tourists in a place where hotel rooms go for more than $500/night might have an impact on residential neighborhoods. An entire residential community can easily become essentially a bungalow resort. Residents move elsewhere to rent their properties here. Properties are bought and enhanced, perhaps by tourism development companies, to tap into the demand. Home prices become ever more unaffordable for those that actually want to live here. It has been happening for some time in St. Helena and the impacts are now being recognized. The Napa City planning commission, unfortunately, has given the blessing for the residential hollowing to proceed there.

It is only one of the many impacts that have begun to change the rural, small-town quality of life that residents have long enjoyed living in Napa County, and that makes this a special place in the Bay Area as an economy built on an agricultural product is transformed to an economy built on tourism.

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