CHICAGO — For the past 24 years John Furr has lived on Cedar Street, a one-block enclave of Brownstones and other stately Gold Coast homes lined between Rush Street and Lake Shore Drive.
Being so close to Rush Street's bars, Furr said he'd gotten used to the "party central part of Chicago."
But something changed one night last summer, when he noticed 15 young men cramming into his neighbor's home. At 5 p.m. the bachelor party was passing beers out of a trolley bus parked in the street. By 1 a.m. Furr saw one of his new, transient neighbors drop his pants and "defecate" on the sidewalk.
The men left later that morning, only to be replaced by a new group of partygoers the next weekend.
"We expect a certain amount of this, but at the same time you don't expect it to be a challenge to the investment you made," Furr said. "It's a neighborhood, it's a community. We respect each other."
Furr is one of many Chicagoans living in neighborhoods like the Gold Coast, River North and Lincoln Park who say they've been overrun with absentee neighbors renting out their homes to short-term guests. Unsupervised and mostly unregulated, the weekend warriors wear out their welcome with loud parties that start off annoying and oftentimes turn disgusting.
"You wouldn't put 10 couples in a hotel on Michigan Avenue," said Hope Hughes of Lincoln Park. "They can’t do what they want to do at a hotel, but they can rent this place out and it’s the 'party pad.' "
The remarks come as the city council weighs a new ordinance meant to regulate Airbnb, VRBO, and other home-sharing services. The ordinance is aimed at obtaining more revenue from the start-ups, but neighbors and some aldermen have since lobbied Mayor Rahm Emanuel to hold renters and their hosts more accountable.
"Few of us who own or rent ever expect to live alongside non-stop partygoers. But in our wards, residents are doing just that, fighting to close illegal hotels on their blocks," Alds. Brian Hopkins (2nd), Brendan Reilly (42nd), Michele Smith (43rd) and Tom Tunney (44th) wrote in an Op-Ed last week.
The ordinance drafted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office intends to identify the thousands of unlicensed vacation rentals in the city and tax them without curbing the business. Chicagoans made $34 million off Airbnb rentals last year alone, and many vacation homes fill a need in neighborhoods on the city's South and West sides that don't have many traditional hotels, according to Airbnb.
But of the thousands of active listings on any vacation-rental website here, only 131 in Chicago are licensed, said Mika Stambaugh, a spokeswoman in the city's department of business affairs and consumer protections. The new ordinance would attempt to reign in unlicensed rentals and levy a 4 percent surcharge against them.
As of Monday afternoon, the proposal would also limit the number of vacation rentals per building, pin renter liability on the host, and require hosts stay on-site while renting a single-family property, all restrictions Airbnb feels go too far.
"While we support many of the core tenets of the Mayor’s proposal, as written today we cannot support the ordinance given the disproportionate impact it would have on Chicago’s middle class and the unrealistic, problematic expectations it would place on hosting platforms like Airbnb," company spokesman Christopher Nulty said in a statement.
A City Council committee is set to hear the new ordinance Tuesday morning.
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