2025 boggled the mind, and while we don’t know what lies ahead, we’re sensing that 2026 will leave us feeling some déjà vu—particularly in the world of short-term rentals (STRs). Read below for the latest in our city’s STR saga, and find ways to join the housing justice fight.
Short-Term Rental Updates
On January 13, New Orleans will face a critical step in the fight to regulate STRs, which include those homes rented on sites like Airbnb and VRBO. On that day, the City Planning Commission (CPC) will decide what regulatory recommendations it will forward to City Council for a final vote. These regulations will dictate how commercial short-term rentals (CSTRs), which are all STRs on properties that are zoned as mixed-use or commercial, are treated moving forward.
CSTRs understandably evoke images of “commercial” spaces—event halls, industrial kitchens, and the like. However, CSTRs are residences like any other that could be rented out to long-term New Orleanians. There is nothing functionally special about the homes or apartments that are rented as CSTRs other than that they happen to be on lots or streets that are zoned mixed-use or commercial. Given New Orleans’ historically patchwork zoning, such lots and streets run through our residential neighborhoods, allowing for neighborhood corner stores, grocers, and restaurants.
Accordingly, CSTRs plague New Orleans’ residential neighborhoods. In some neighborhoods, there are square blocks on which there is significantly greater capacity for STR guests (50+ STR guests per square block) than for long-term residents. There are 1,251 active CSTR permits in New Orleans as of this article’s writing, and each of those 1,251 CSTRs could be home to a long-term New Orleanian (or 10!).
In 2023, after the Brown’s Dairy CSTR crisis awoke City Council to the reality that there were no controls in place to stop the proliferation of CSTRs, they implemented an Interim Zoning District (IZD) that would prevent the creation of new CSTRs except by Council vote. This process still saw dozens of CSTRs approved, including ones at 1201 Canal Street that stood to displace dozens of families until public outcry made the Council reverse course. That IZD expired in November, meaning a new zoning decision is needed on CSTR regulation.
Accordingly, in early 2025, the City contracted with a planning firm, Desire Line, to conduct a “Transient Lodging Study” (TLS) about transient lodging uses including CSTRs as well as hotels, motels, and bed-and-breakfasts. The study was tasked with reviewing data, collecting public input, and making regulatory recommendations. The initial version of the TLS came out in late October, and a public forum was held at the December 9 CPC meeting to determine which of the study’s recommendations the CPC should accept and forward onto the City Council for final vote and implementation.
At that December 9 CPC meeting, advocates came out in force to demand better than the TLS had offered. They highlighted the study’s bias in favor of STR owners, its lack of acknowledgment about how STRs accelerate displacement, and many of its worst recommendations: that large CSTRs hosting up to 20 guests be newly allowed, that all existing CSTRs be “grandfathered” in to any new regulatory scheme, that some wealthier neighborhoods be protected from new CSTRs while others, like Central City and Mid-City, be subject to continued STR expansion, and more.
The CPC heard advocates’ input and tasked Desire Line with revising their study to incorporate advocates’ feedback and revise many of its most troubling recommendations. The time has never been more ripe to add your voice to the chorus demanding better. Cities around the world are seeing the damage done by STRs to neighborhood quality of life and to cost of living, and are thus revoking STR-enabling legislation altogether. New Orleans could do the same, and it certainly does not need to take up the study’s worst recommendations.
You can read the TLS in its current form on the CPC website, and you have the opportunity to share your discontent about its recommendations either via email to CPCinfo@nola.gov by Monday, January 5 at 5 p.m.; or via in-person public comment at the Tuesday, January 13 CPC meeting at 1:30 p.m. in City Hall Chambers. Even stating you want New Orleans to be liveable and affordable for long-term residents and that you want to see no new STRs is sufficient comment! Follow @janeplace_communitylandtrust on Instagram for updates.
In addition to joining those rallying for better STR regulations, consider joining our comrades with Santosha Village for their fundraiser at Twelve Mile Limit on January 9! They consistently accompany and serve our unhoused neighbors with community and direct care, and are raising funds to continue their operations amidst sweeps by City and state police that separate our unhoused neighbors from their survival supplies like tents and sleeping bags.
This space is provided to Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative as a community service and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or editorial policies of ANTIGRAVITY.
