The fight against short-term rentals in North Texas came to Lewisville Monday night as residents — some dressed in white shirts with the words “Homes Not Hotels” on the front — filled city council chambers for a public hearing on the issue.
For members of the Lewisville Neighborhood Coalition, the hearing was the first step to getting an ordinance in place to restrict short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods.
Short-term rentals, or STRs, are residential dwellings available for guest lodging for a period ranging from 1 to 29 days, including dwellings listed on vacation rental websites like Airbnb or Vrbo.
Several North Texas cities including Dallas, Fort Worth and Planohave restricted them in recent months.
Now, Lewisville residents like Jeff Woods hope to do the same for their city.
“Traffic is just a huge concern, trash noise, police,” said Woods, who has lived in Lewisville his whole life. “It really has come to the point that we are actually living in fear because it's almost like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop because you never know what's going to happen the next weekend.”
Woods is a member of the Lewisville Neighborhood Coalition — a chapter of the Texas Neighborhood Coalition — which was created three months ago by his wife, Ainsley Stelling.
Woods and Stelling live in a neighborhood with about 20 homes; they said three of the homes are STRs. Wood said some of the rentals have at times between from 8 to 16 people coming in and out.
“I just feel trapped for the fact that these short-term rental owners have come in and they have established these unregulated lodgings, so to speak, in our neighborhood, single-family neighborhood that was never designed for that,” he said.
Texas collects a 6% hotel occupancy tax on STRs like Airbnbs. Because of this, some residents in the Lewisville Neighborhood Coalition compared STRs to hotels and businesses.
But resident Tim Gorts, who rents his house as an Airbnb when his family is not living there, said STRs are far from a one-bedroom hotel room.
“The people that are renting out my property for the weekend, we don't charge the same as a little one room Holiday Inn, you know,” he said. “It's meant for a large capacity because it's a huge property.”
Gorts has been an Airbnb host for over a year and said the revenue from his STR has helped with his family’s finances.
Although some corporations backed by private equity groups have bought thousands of single-family homes to turn into rentals, Gorts said he’s using his home to share it with those who need it.
“When we're not using the house, we share it with other people and we use this to pay our bills and for our medicines and help a volunteer organization,” he said. “We're not out here some big corporation. This is our home.”
In a city survey about short-term rentals conducted prior to the public hearing, the majority of respondents said they did not own a STR but lived near one. Out of the around 330 total respondents, 241 were in favor of regulating, and 194 were in favor of prohibiting in residential neighborhoods.
Monday night’s public hearing is the beginning of the short-term rental debate in Lewisville.
Resident David Margulies said the Lewisville Neighborhood Coalition is asking the city attorney to meet with coalition experts to craft an ordinance restricting STRs, similar to Arlington.
In 2019, Arlington adopted two ordinances allowing short-term rentals in a zone anchored by its Entertainment District, and in residential medium density and multi-family zones.
Margulies said the short-term debate isn’t exclusive to North Texas, or even the United States. Short-term rentals have been banned or restricted in countries like Portugal and Italy.
“You can't say, ‘Oh, it's a few bad apples. It's just a couple of people,'” he said. “It's a worldwide problem. And so, cities are finding creative ways to allow them to exist where they should exist, but to regulate them the way other businesses are regulated.”
