When Airbnb first emerged around 2010, the idea of short-term rentals (STRs) was ostensibly a benevolent one—homeowners with a spare bedroom or tenants leaving town for a few days could rent out their available space to travelers looking to explore on a budget. But over the past 15 years, real estate moguls and property management behemoths like Sonder have transformed STRs into something entirely different—a social force both insidious and ubiquitous. The few temporarily available rooms left on websites like Airbnb are now vastly outnumbered by entire homes, many of which housed local families not so long ago but are now owned and operated by corporations.
This is especially true in tourist cities like New Orleans, where demand for short stays will always be a sure bet. And while similarly iconic cities like New York or Barcelona are in the process of curtailing or outlawing STRs altogether, the New Orleans City government has for years struggled—or refused—to organize any kind of enforcement that effectively clamps down on the practice. In a December 2022 study, Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative released a report stating that of the more than 6,000 listed properties on Airbnb, “85%… across New Orleans [are] for whole-home rentals, but 64% of the total listings are from hosts with more than one listing, and a whopping 27% of the total are from hosts with 10 or more listings.” That same study explained that “in the Tremé/Lafitte, approximately 10% of the neighborhood’s 3,233 total housing units”—317 homes, to be exact—“are listed on Airbnb as whole-home or apartment short-term rentals,” depriving over a thousand New Orleanians of a place to stay.
But after years of political deadlock around the issue, New Orleans finally finds itself in a potentially redemptive moment: This past February, U.S. District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle almost entirely upheld the City Council’s second major attempt at regulating STRs, which includes a one-per-square-block limit on permits. The new regulations also require that any residential STR have an operator who resides full-time at the property, while banning corporate ownership over residential STRs. This has given way to a mad dash, in which an understaffed and notoriously dysfunctional enforcement department is scrambling to keep up with a backlog of illegal STRs that are still fully operational throughout the city—as of the 2022 Jane Place study, “over 3,400 (65%) of the whole-home listings on Airbnb alone were operating without a current, legal permit.” Now, equipped with the legal authority to start enforcing its own regulatory policy, employees in the local STR office can address its excess of open cases. But since the burden of proof falls with the City, and the only enforceable penalty is monetary fines, the process of curtailing illegal STRs is an uphill battle.
This is where we come in—photographic evidence that a house is being illegally rented out as an STR is an essential part of enforcement, and the City simply doesn’t have sufficient personnel or resources to drive around and snap photos of tourists as they’re entering and exiting their temporary pied-à-terres. What follows is a step-by-step guide on how you can identify an illegal STR on your block and help ensure that your neighborhood remains exactly that—a neighborhood—by putting pressure on property owners to either properly register their STRs with the City or turn them into long-term residences for people who actually live here.
STEP 1: IDENTIFYING AN STR
At this point, you’ve seen it a million times—an Uber pulls up to a seemingly empty home and turns its hazards on. Several passengers exit the car, hastily pulling suitcases from the trunk as they fumble around and retrieve their keys from the lockbox. Or, in the words of an STR Enforcement officer (on background), you watch “a group of five dudes walk into the house with hand grenades—people who live here know those bros don’t actually live next door.” By simply taking note of what’s going on and where it’s happening, you’ve taken the first major step.
STEP 2: FINDING AN STR LICENSE APPLICATION
Once you’ve identified an STR, your impulse might be to check whether the property has an associated listing on Airbnb, VRBO, or Booking.com. It wouldn’t hurt to find this, but the search, which can be fruitless if the owner has cleverly concealed the home’s online presence, is almost always going to be more trouble than it’s worth. If we can spot a tourist from a mile away, then we sure-as-hell can spot an STR—the key here is to trust your gut.
Determining whether the property is legally licensed with the City, on the other hand, is more straightforward. First, you log on to onestopapp.nola.gov (One Stop App), and type in the property’s street address in the search bar on the top of the screen. If it’s a multi-unit structure like a double shotgun, make sure you type in all addresses belonging to the property, as the STR could be assigned to any one of them.
The “Results” page for the address in question will likely contain a lot of irrelevant material, since it has every permit, license, project, violation, or work order that’s ever been applied for or registered with the City. For your purposes, all you’ll need is the Short Term Rental license application, which could fall under one of four classifications:
- Non-Commercial (NSTRs): For residentially zoned properties
- Commercial (CSTRs): For commercially zoned properties
- Hotel/Bed & Breakfast (XSTRs): For registered B&Bs or hotels that are listing a room/space on an STR site
- Operator (OSTRs): For an on-site operator, which is a pre-condition for any Non-Commercial STRs, but not for Commercial STRs.
If you can’t find an STR license application associated with any of the addresses on the property, then you should assume no application has been filed, and that the STR is not authorized—if this is the case, skip ahead to Step 5.
STEP 3: FINDING A VALID LICENSE
If you do see STR applications filed, you’ll want to find the most recent one listed on the One Stop page. Toward the bottom of the widget for that application, you’ll see its “status”—if this says anything other than “issued,” then the STR license is likely not active, and the property is almost certainly operating illegally. An “approved” or “under review” status does not authorize legal operation of an STR—only an “issued” status is valid. Additionally, the words “Closed: No” should be on the right side of the widget, indicating that this particular case remains open. A license that has been issued for a case that’s currently closed is not valid. If the STR license is not valid, either because it is unissued or the case is closed, you can skip ahead to Step 5.
STEP 4: LOOKING INTO THE NUANCES
Even if you find a valid, active license, there are still a few details worth checking before assuming the STR is operating legally. First, whereas Commercial STRs require only one license (a CSTR), Non-Commercial/Residential STRs require two: an NSTR and an OSTR, which identifies and authorizes an on-site operator (not necessarily the owner) who lives on the property and “supervises” the rental unit while it’s in use. A property that has a fully valid NSTR, but lacks an issued and active OSTR, is not in compliance with regulations. If this applies to the property in question, skip ahead to Step 5.
In some cases, you might also find that a valid OSTR is dubious in nature: Perhaps there’s no discernible space where an operator could actually stay while visitors are present, or maybe you’ve never seen anyone other than tourists and housekeepers go into and out of the property. The fraudulent nature of a valid OSTR would be much harder, but not impossible, to document.
The other primary concern here is occupancy—if you click the “View” button under the NSTR or CSTR application on the One Stop page, you’ll find all of the regulatory information relevant to that property. The most important detail here is the “Maximum Number of Guests,” which STR owners will often ignore in their listings. Maybe you live next to a double-shotgun house that 10 frat bros magically squeeze into every other weekend for a bachelor party—if it’s keeping you and your neighbors up at night, and noise complaints aren’t doing a whole lot of good, you might want to check the “Maximum Number of Guests.”
STEP 5: OBTAINING & COMPILING EVIDENCE
Assuming you’ve found that the STR in question lacks a valid, active license or is committing some infraction, you’ll want to start compiling photographic evidence that supports your claim. Maybe you have a home security device, such as a Ring camera, that faces the property in question—you can take time-stamped screenshots of tourists coming in and out of the home, which would be extremely valuable evidence for the STR Enforcement office. Or maybe you’re fully committed to a new hobby as a housing-justice vigilante, and want to post up outside of a house—this method may be a bit creepy, but all photographs help make a compelling case, and the ends could justify the means.
Photographic evidence is most effective for enforcement purposes if it contains some indication of the tourists’ itinerant status: “If you get them with their suitcases or coming out of a taxi, that’s a bonus; or if you get a whole party of 10 people walking into a two-bedroom house, that’s great,” according to the STR Enforcement officer on background. And the more photos you provide of one property across time, the stronger the case is against the property owner. Each photo taken on a different day could warrant a single STR violation, which can carry a financial penalty of $250 to $1,000 for each first-time infraction and $500 to $2,000 for any repeat infraction. To date, the maximum penalty levied against a property owner has been just over $35,000.
STEP 6: FILING A CLAIM & SUBMITTING EVIDENCE
Once you’ve confirmed an STR is invalid or illegal, you can go to nola.gov/report-an-str-violation to file a claim with the local STR Enforcement office. Click the “Report STR Complaints Online” button, and you’ll find a number of options, including “Unauthorized Short-Term Rental,” “Fraudulent Owner Occupation,” and “Violations of Occupancy Limits.” You’ll be asked to provide the address of the property in question, any additional details, an up-to-date listing on Airbnb, VRBO, or Booking.com (if you’ve found one), and any supporting evidence: screenshots, photos, videos, audio recordings, booking statements, etc. The only required information here is the address, but any other details will save STR inspectors time as they prepare the case for adjudication.
You can submit more evidence to the STR Enforcement department after filing a claim by sending additional photos to str@nola.gov with the relevant address in the subject line. All additional photos could be used to increase the fine imposed on the property owner by hundreds or thousands of dollars. Hopefully, the pileup of photos will tip the scales, and the owner will start considering selling or renting the property on a long-term basis. Per the STR Enforcement officer: “Sending in one new photo every week—especially if it’s the same picture from the same angle of the same property with a different group of people—is going to be extremely helpful, whereas one standalone photo of a couple entering the house doesn’t prove much.”
STEP 7: FOLLOW UP
Once you’ve made the report and submitted evidence, it will likely take weeks, if not months, before the case goes to a formal adjudication. Inspectors are technically supposed to invite complainants to the hearing, but “they rarely do,” according to the STR Enforcement officer. But this isn’t all that important—as helpful as it would be to have neighbors come in to present their evidence and testify on the STR’s impact, and as much as you might care about the adjudication’s outcome, your primary impact will come from the photographic evidence that you’ve already submitted. Perhaps the next time you’ll hear anything about the property will be in a few months, when you look outside and notice a U-Haul parked in front of the property, instead of another Uber.
Since September, a number of developments have offered a glimmer of hope, at least on paper: Exceptions to the one-STR-per-block limit, which offered a gaping loophole in the most recent round of regulations, have been discontinued for the next year; and STR sites like Airbnb and VRBO will soon be “forced” (whatever that means) to regularly verify that all listings on their sites have valid, active licenses with the City. Though it won’t be enacted until after the chaos of the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras has subsided in early 2025, this second measure could go a long way towards returning homes to people who actually need them. Who knows, it may even mean there’s less need for residents to try out their best private investigator impressions in the bushes outside of sketchy STRs.
But this problem is too urgent, and our city government too unreliable, for us to take our collective foot off the gas. The City does have several more tools at its disposal that it could put into effect with enough pressure: For one, Celeste Sparks, the local STR administrator, could demand that Entergy shut off the meter on any property that’s committing multiple STR infractions, but she has used this tool sparingly, at best. As of this writing, the power remains with owners of illegal STRs, who can simply perform a cost-benefit analysis when considering whether to keep their properties open: If they keep profiting, even with the fines imposed, they don’t have much incentive to shut down. If their electric meter gets shut off, though, they might be a little more hard-pressed to sell.
As long as we remain in this transitional moment, when the promises made have yet to materialize, we can’t let small legislative victories lull us into complacency. Instead, let’s continue to prod at every nerve ending our City government has, from City Hall to the One Stop App, to make sure the people up-top know that their constituents—the people they report to—collectively and resoundingly stand against every kind of land grab that’s keeping our neighbors displaced. It’s only through collective action, whether creepy or conventional, that we can keep their feet to the fire.
Illustrations by Laura Frizzell
