In eastern Placer, which covers a 50-mile expanse of unincorporated territory on the western side of Tahoe, the county launched its first short-term rental permit program in January 2020. Officials in Placer County and Truckee rolled out new procedures for rentals as the region swelled with tourists over the summer. The law froze new permits and permit renewals for hosting short-term rentals in residential areas.īut when the coronavirus pandemic hit, remote-working urbanites decamped to the mountains, blowing up Tahoe’s housing market and underscoring the urgency of the situation.

South Lake Tahoe, home to about 22,000 residents, has taken the most aggressive approach, one that started in 2018 after voters approved Measure T. The effort to regulate short-term rentals, which are defined as units rented for 30 or fewer days at a time, isn’t new for the past three years, Tahoe communities on the California side of the lake have been instituting rules to assuage the mounting tensions between locals and tourists and lay the groundwork for future regulations. Still, she says, for full-time residents, “It’s a drag.” She says she understands the appeal to distant owners of making a buck off of their vacant properties. “It’s like living next to a bunch of hotels,” Jones says.

But with the advent of easy-to-use online booking marketplaces, homes that may have once been occupied sporadically are now rented year-round. Lakeside lodges around the international ski and sun destination have long been vacation homes belonging to wealthy second-homeowners.

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