Airbnbs are taking over historic Annapolis streets. One Alderman wants to rein them in.
When Pat Zeno lived on quaint Cornhill Street in downtown Annapolis, she could turn left out her door to see Maryland’s State House. If not for a slight bend in the road to her right, she could see City Dock.
“For a number of years when we lived on Cornhill, we had great neighbors,” Zeno recalled. “Some of the neighbors owned their properties and some of them rented. We would help each other out and get together for parties.”
By 2020, Zeno and her husband had retired. Annapolis was getting too expensive and they wanted to move closer to family. But something else was driving them away from the historic district they’d loved for the last 25 years: new homeowners renting out their properties on platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo.
“With the short-term rentals, there were no neighbors, there were just people renting on the weekends. It was a total change,” Zeno said. “It was sad. It was very sad for us.”
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Annapolis currently has 327 short-term rental licenses, according to the city. Most of them are in the downtown historic district.
The Annapolis alderman who represents that district, Democrat Harry Huntley, wants to prevent what’s happened on Cornhill Street, where there are hardly any owner-occupied houses, from spreading all over the city. This month, he introduced an ordinance that would limit future short-term rentals.
Huntley’s legislation would prohibit the city from issuing new short-term rental licenses on any block where they account for 10% of homes. The bill would grandfather existing short-term rentals, meaning people who have licenses on blocks that already exceed the threshold wouldn’t lose them.
“It’s not the existence of short-term rentals, it’s feeling like they’re taking over a neighborhood so much that we don’t have neighborhoods,” Huntley said. “Short-term rentals can be part of our community, but they can’t be all of our community or we won’t have a community.”
Democratic Mayor Gavin Buckley credited Huntley with “working to resolve the complex issue of housing,” which he said requires getting “the balance just right.”
“We need some short-term options, but we also need to ensure that rental housing remains available to working families — and that they are not priced out of the housing market,“ Buckley said in a statement. “In this area Annapolis is not alone — cities across the country are all working to strike a balance between short-term rental availability and housing availability.”
The proliferation of short-term rentals increases rent costs because it decreases the rental stock, said Jeremy Schwartz, chair of economics at Loyola’s Sellinger School of Business and Management. The phenomenon also can boost housing prices because “any time you have an option on any kind of asset, it should be worth more.”
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Huntley’s bill is the latest attempt by Annapolis lawmakers to regulate the vacation rental industry, with the City Council having passed approximately 10 ordinances or resolutions about them since 2019. The proposed per block cap for short-term rentals mirrors one the city has for traditional bed and breakfasts.
In Annapolis, people who want to list their properties on the likes of Airbnb and Vrbo must get a $400 annual license and pay the same tax a hotel does. One person can only own one short-term rental and either the owner or a property manager has to live in the city.
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An amendment to Huntley’s bill would exempt owner-occupied short-term rentals, which account for just 8% of such rental properties in Annapolis, from the cap.
Larkin doesn’t think Huntley’s bill goes far enough.
“It’s better than nothing,” Larkin said. “I would like to see them be more restrictive and push short-term rentals to be more dispersed through the city rather than right here on this street.”