City Eyes Regulation Of Airbnb

Amid growing complaints from neighbors, New Haven is looking to start regulating the mushrooming Airbnb business in town — in such a way that they won’t land the city in court.

Upper Westville Alder Daryl Brackeen Jr. has submitted an ordinance amendment ​“concerning short-term rentals of residential locations,” to open up an avenue for alders to work with the Harp administration to deal with people who are renting out their homes as makeshift hotels.

Internally, city officials have been looking for the last six months at how to address houses that are used for Airbnbs, according to city Building Official Jim Turcio.

“We’ve been getting complaints from every section of the city from East Rock to Westville to the East Shore,” Turcio said. ​“I think there are three or four houses down from me.” The complaints are usually about cars with out-of-state license plates parking in front of peoples’ homes and their driveways, noise from parties, and trash, he said.

With the dearth of hotel rooms in the city, Turcio said that last year there were 11,000 Airbnb rentals in New Haven. Currently there are no ordinances on the books that regulate such rentals.

He said virtually every city in the country is struggling with how to deal with the ​“sharing economy” powered by platforms like Airbnb. When cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco have tried to crack down, Airbnb has not been afraid to luanch costly lawsuits.

“We want to get it right,” Turcio said of any ordinance that New Haven might develop addressing short-term rentals. ​“We don’t want to go to court.”

During a Westville/West Hills Management Team meeting last week at Mauro Sheridan School, neighbors showed up at their wit’s end over a house at the intersection of Lawncrest Road and Greenhill Terrace that has become an Airbnb house in Upper Westville’s Beverly Hills district. One neighbor said she has seen so many people come and go that she’s started calling it the ​“sleepover” house.

When contacted, the home’s owner, Sim Levenhartz, was less willing to classify the house, which has undergone extensive renovations, as an Airbnb location, even though on Monday it was listed on Airbnb’s site for rent at $190 a night. It also is listed for sale on Realtor.com for $279,700.

Levenhartz Monday said that he’s not at the house often because he is working on obtaining his citizenship. He said he is from Israel and spends a lot of time between there and New York. Though he’s not here often, he does own several other properties around the city, mostly in the Dixwell, Newhallville, and Hill sections of the city through the Sim Lev Properties LLC. The Lawncrest Road House is owned by a company he formed called 103 Lawncrest LLC.

Neighbors complained of watching a number of cars with out-of-state license plates coming and going. A couple of weekends ago guests threw a raucous party that left the neighborhood strewn with trash, they said.

They also complained about two other houses — one they believed to be an illegal boarding house, the other they believed to be a Section 8‑rental property possibly with inhabitants who weren’t on the lease. A visit the day after the meeting by a housing inspector and a neighborhood specialist from the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative, determined those claims to be unsubstantiated.

Alder Brackeen said each of the houses that neighbors complained about had had at one time been for sale and then sat on the market.

LCI Neighborhood Specialist Jillian Driscoll said at Wednesday’s meeting that Westville has about 40 vacant houses, down from about 51 previously, in the neighborhood.

Levenhartz disputed that anyone connected to his house had trashed the neighborhood. He said that if anyone saw someone without out-of-state plates coming and going it was he and his wife and their newborn daughter. He said if his paperwork comes through, the family plans to move to the property permanently. If not, he plans to sell the house, he said.

“With all due respect, I think the neighbors have an issue with me because I did a very nice job on my house taking the value much higher,” he said. ​“I don’t think there is any house that is close to this house in the neighborhood.”

Neighbor Ana Brown said the Greenhill Terrace neighbors are a tight-knit group.

“They don’t live there so they don’t care,” she said at the meeting of the problems raised with all three houses. ​“They don’t clean up. And what ends up happening is there is trash all over the place. We don’t want that in our community.”