Mayor Rahm Emanuel is seeking to ease one of the city rules imposed on Airbnb hosts, asking aldermen this week to consider removing the requirement that lists of guest names must be made available to officials on request.
Under the change, which the City Council license committee will consider Wednesday, Airbnb operators would still have to keep guests’ names for three years, but hosts only would be required to share them if officials came with a search warrant or subpoena.
The mayor has been trying to walk the line of regulating the burgeoning home-sharing industry for the past year. The council easily approved his package of Airbnb rules last summer, but the company and many of the Chicagoans who rent out their places said the standards are too onerous.
Last year, a group representing Airbnb hosts filed a lawsuit claiming the city rules were unconstitutional.
Emanuel has defended Airbnb as a way for visitors to find places to sleep and spend money in less flashy neighborhoods outside the downtown hotel zone.
But some aldermen, particularly in tonier lakefront wards on the North Side and around downtown, have complained their neighborhoods are getting overrun by weekend revelers who don’t have ties to the communities, leaving some areas ghost towns as condos sit empty during the week and in the winter months.
And the hotel industry has lobbied hard to make Airbnb face some of the regulatory hoops that traditional hotels have to jump through.
Airbnb off the hook on policing Chicago rule breakers Rianne Coale
Airbnb and Mayor Emanuel have been butting heads on some of the online rental company’s policies, but they’ve seemed to work out a compromise on one of the rules.
Emanuel dropped a provision from the latest version of a controversial ordinance, aimed at governing the fast-growing online rental…
Airbnb and Mayor Emanuel have been butting heads on some of the online rental company’s policies, but they’ve seemed to work out a compromise on one of the rules.
Emanuel dropped a provision from the latest version of a controversial ordinance, aimed at governing the fast-growing online rental…
(Rianne Coale)
Emanuel’s rules require the company to pay a 4 percent surcharge on each rental. The $2 million a year the city estimated would be raised is earmarked toward services for homeless people, allowing the mayor to try to position the package as a way to get a wealthy corporation to kick in for the social good.
And the version that eventually passed included a clause to give residents in parts of the city zoned for single-family homes the ability to pass petitions to restrict the home rentals in those areas. But it gave no such possible local control in denser neighborhoods with larger rental buildings and condominium complexes.
jebyrne@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @_johnbyrne
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