Letter: Why destroy such an important part of Paso Robles tourism infrastructure?
Letter submitted to Paso Robles City Councilmembers:
Hi, Steve/Fred/Maria/Tom/Warren, we were shocked by your recent votes to ban short-term rentals in Paso’s R1-zone, which includes our vacation home.
We found out and fell in love with Paso by chance: for years we’ve been traveling from the San Jose area to Los Angeles, without even hearing about Paso. Around 2016 we happened to stop by Paso as we were trying to find a place to rest for lunch and continued our road trip, and were so impressed with the food in downtown that we started to explore more. After a few more trips and wine tastings, we were so in love with it we decided to have a vacation home there.
With the help of a local agent in Paso, it took us 10 months and many weekend trips, each one taking 3 hours one way, to finally purchase our house. We thought we not only can spend some of our vacations there, we might even be able to retire here in the future. A key part of our financial plan is to supplement our mortgage payment by having the house rented out short-term, so that we can enjoy the house when we want, while opening up the house to others, hopefully fellow wine and food lovers, so that we can maintain the house financially. It took us a full quarter to furnish the house with this plan, and with future fellow wine and food lover guests in mind, working with local contractors and materials suppliers, all the way to furniture stores locally and in San Luis Obispo, often making friends with many of them. Along the way, we interviewed a local property management company to help us manage the short-term rental for the house, making sure everything the city requires is complied. We also talked to our immediate neighbors to ensure they know how to contact us and our property managers should there be any concerns re. our guests.
So far it’s been such wonderful experience, we not only spend more time wine tasting in Paso, we also brought in friends and families, many of whom heard about Paso from us for the first time. From our own vacation and the experience of short-term renting the house for over a year, we know that houses like ours fill an important need for Paso visitors: many larger parties (family reunions, wedding parties, etc.) much prefer a house where everyone can stay together (so they can cook, be more relaxed, etc.) to staying separately in hotels. We believe our house is an integral part of a City like Paso, for which tourism is a major pillar of the local economy.
That is, until we learned about your decision to ban short-term rental of our house.
My first thought was: are you really making this decision with Paso’s best interest in mind (since I already consider Paso MY city)? Why are you destroying an important piece of Paso’s tourism infrastructure, just like that?
Then: how dare you ruining our hard work for the last two years with no regard for fairness, our rights and hardship! For one: if your ban takes effect, I will have to sell my house (very likely at a huge loss). And, we will leave with this take-away: Paso does not welcome us!
And: what is compelling you to use such blunt and draconian instrument to solve what should be a easily manageable/regulated problem (that is, if there were a widespread, serious problem at all–not that I’m aware of)? Not to mention how the proposal to ban came into your agenda in the eleventh hour. Where is good governance for an issue that affects so many of your citizens’ welfare and interest, such as ours?
I sincerely ask that you reconsider your decision to ban short-term rental in R-1 zone! There are so many reasonable ways to manage/regulate short-term rentals in R-1, so that Paso overall benefits!
Respectfully,
Nick Huang
Paso Robles
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