This Long Beach neighborhood just became the first to ban unhosted short-term rentals

Andy Oliver had never been to a City Council meeting before a year ago, and like most residents, wasn’t interested in decisions made by elected leaders.

“I really should have been,” he says now, after a series of problems with an unhosted short-term rental next door to his College Estates home that culminated in a shooting on his front porch in early January.

That violent incident catalyzed Oliver and his neighbors in Census Tract 5745, Block Group 2, to become the first in the city to successfully petition for a ban on unhosted short-term rentals — a provision that was tucked into the 2020 law to appease residents worried about potential problems.

After weeks of walking the 800-or-so-home Census Block Group with other neighbors in hopes of gathering support, Oliver got word Friday that the petition had passed by a slim margin: More than half of nearby homeowners had signed and mailed a petition back to the city’s Community Development Department.

“We were all tired of the city being dismissive of us,” Oliver said. “The residents in this neighborhood just want to live in peace.”

The shooting on Jan. 2 led Oliver to research how to stop the next-door owner from renting out his home — sometimes by the hour, neighbors say — without physically being present.

The 2020 ordinance passed by the City Council i nitially did not allow these “unhosted” rentals, but leaders changed that shortly after , allowing up to 800 unhosted rentals across Long Beach — with the provision that any resident in a specific Census Block Group could circulate a petition to ban unsupervised rentals.

Oliver knew it would be a challenge; he had heard that three previous attempts in other neighborhoods had failed. Most residents, he said, were unaffected — and like him, didn’t care much about city politics.

But he and others blanketed the neighborhood, an effort over the past few months that brought the neighborhood together, said Brian Russell, a resident who supported the petition. When they heard it had passed, “we were all out front, high-fiving each other,” he said. “It was a really neat thing.”

Oliver, a media executive by trade, says the experience has turned him into an activist.

He connected with a group in Texas that tracks unhosted rentals around the country and a Los Angeles nonprofit that agreed to pick up the $1,050 filing fee for the petition. And he launched a community action group called Long Beach Safe Neighborhood Coalition to educate others.

“I don’t want anybody to have to go through what I went through,” Oliver said.

A spokesman for the Community Development Department said officials are currently counting responses from eight other Census Block Groups in the city to potentially ban unhosted rentals, with a ninth petition now being circulated.

The City Council, for its part, voted in April to begin looking at tightening restrictions on short-term rentals in the wake of the January shooting. More than a dozen residents spoke at that meeting, complaining of loud parties, drug use and film shoots disrupting neighbors as a result of short-term rentals.

There are a total of 618 unhosted rentals in Long Beach, and leaders said in April that the majority are following local laws and operating peacefully.

But given the complaints and the January shooting, staff recommended changes to city law that include treating reports of violent crimes more seriously than other infractions; currently all violations are treated the same. Officials also want to eliminate lags in handing out citations to property owners and specify that rentals cannot be used for filming without a permit.

Any potential changes to the ordinance would come back to the City Council for a vote.

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