Category: reason

Audit Finds Cost of Building Supportive Housing in L.A. Exceeds Median Price of a Market-Rate Condo

High fees, excessive regulation, and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) opposition to new housing have contributed to Los Angeles’ worsening homelessness crisis. Those same things are now frustrating the city’s efforts to construct thousands of units of affordable and supportive housing, where social services can be offered on-site.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Controller Ron Galperin released a damning audit of the performance of Prop. HHH, a $1.2 billion bond issue passed overwhelmingly in 2016 to help finance the construction of 10,000 units of housing for homeless and low-income residents.

“More than two years after the first bond issuance and nearly three years since voters approved HHH, not one bond-funded unit has opened,” Galperin announced. “It is clear that the City’s HHH program is not keeping pace with the growing demand for supportive housing and shelter.”

117 Prop HHH-funded units are scheduled to open in 2019. Los Angeles’ homeless population jumped 16 percent this year to 36,000.

Spiking development costs also mean that Prop HHH will end up subsidizing only about 7,700 units, not the 10,000 units promised to voters.

A 2016 estimate of construction costs put the price of adding new units at between $350,000 to $414,000. But the median per-unit cost at Prop. HHH-funded projects now stands at $531,373. Over 1,000 units are expected to cost over $600,000, and one project has units going for over $700,000.

“The cost of building many of these units exceeds the median sale price of a market-rate condominium in the City of Los Angeles and a single-family home in Los Angeles County,” noted the controller’s audit.

Reason has covered the high cost of building affordable housing in the Los Angeles area before, finding that sky-high land costs, union wage requirements, high development fees, and expensive design requirements have helped to push up the costs of these projects.

The controller’s audit pinpoints many of these factors as helping to raise the costs of Prop HHH, especially the union wage mandates, city fees, and accessibility requirements for units serving disabled tenants.

Also driving up costs are city regulations that require developers receiving Prop HHH funding to have experience building supportive housing, and the need of these developers to piece together financing from multiple local, state, and federal sources.

Compounding all of these factors is Los Angeles’ byzantine permitting process, which can delay projects for years at a time, while also giving neighborhood opponents ample opportunity to slow things up even more.

The city did try to address this problem by passing a 2018 ordinance streamlining approvals for Prop. HHH projects and lifting some zoning regulations, including parking requirements and density limits. Community groups, however, ended up suing the city over that ordinance, claiming it violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

CEQA lawsuits are a favorite tool of NIMBYs to either stop unwanted projects or extract concessions from developers.

In response, the California legislature passed a law this year exempting Prop HHH projects from CEQA. That should speed up project delivery. However, Tuesday’s audit chided the city for streamlining permitting only after committing funding to projects.

The controller’s audit also included a number of recommendations for bringing costs down, including finding more ways of streamlining approvals, embracing cost-saving construction methods, and shifting funding from the most expensive projects to temporary shelters.

Some of these recommendations could also be applied to housing development in general. Los Angeles’ affordability problems are themselves a product of zoning laws that limit where housing can be built, lengthy permitting processes that drag out the approval of what housing is allowed, and state environmental laws that allow project opponents to cynically delay development.

Ensuring that Prop HHH projects don’t run into these roadblocks, as the controller’s audit has recommended, is a good idea. Removing these obstacles for market-rate housing as well might mean fewer people would need to rely on the government to house them in the first place.

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Audit Finds Cost of Building Supportive Housing in L.A. Exceeds Median Price of a Market-Rate Condo

High fees, excessive regulation, and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) opposition to new housing have contributed to Los Angeles’ worsening homelessness crisis. Those same things are now frustrating the city’s efforts to construct thousands of units of affordable and supportive housing, where social services can be offered on-site.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Controller Ron Galperin released a damning audit of the performance of Prop. HHH, a $1.2 billion bond issue passed overwhelmingly in 2016 to help finance the construction of 10,000 units of housing for homeless and low-income residents.

“More than two years after the first bond issuance and nearly three years since voters approved HHH, not one bond-funded unit has opened,” Galperin announced. “It is clear that the City’s HHH program is not keeping pace with the growing demand for supportive housing and shelter.”

117 Prop HHH-funded units are scheduled to open in 2019. Los Angeles’ homeless population jumped 16 percent this year to 36,000.

Spiking development costs also mean that Prop HHH will end up subsidizing only about 7,700 units, not the 10,000 units promised to voters.

A 2016 estimate of construction costs put the price of adding new units at between $350,000 to $414,000. But the median per-unit cost at Prop. HHH-funded projects now stands at $531,373. Over 1,000 units are expected to cost over $600,000, and one project has units going for over $700,000.

“The cost of building many of these units exceeds the median sale price of a market-rate condominium in the City of Los Angeles and a single-family home in Los Angeles County,” noted the controller’s audit.

Reason has covered the high cost of building affordable housing in the Los Angeles area before, finding that sky-high land costs, union wage requirements, high development fees, and expensive design requirements have helped to push up the costs of these projects.

The controller’s audit pinpoints many of these factors as helping to raise the costs of Prop HHH, especially the union wage mandates, city fees, and accessibility requirements for units serving disabled tenants.

Also driving up costs are city regulations that require developers receiving Prop HHH funding to have experience building supportive housing, and the need of these developers to piece together financing from multiple local, state, and federal sources.

Compounding all of these factors is Los Angeles’ byzantine permitting process, which can delay projects for years at a time, while also giving neighborhood opponents ample opportunity to slow things up even more.

The city did try to address this problem by passing a 2018 ordinance streamlining approvals for Prop. HHH projects and lifting some zoning regulations, including parking requirements and density limits. Community groups, however, ended up suing the city over that ordinance, claiming it violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

CEQA lawsuits are a favorite tool of NIMBYs to either stop unwanted projects or extract concessions from developers.

In response, the California legislature passed a law this year exempting Prop HHH projects from CEQA. That should speed up project delivery. However, Tuesday’s audit chided the city for streamlining permitting only after committing funding to projects.

The controller’s audit also included a number of recommendations for bringing costs down, including finding more ways of streamlining approvals, embracing cost-saving construction methods, and shifting funding from the most expensive projects to temporary shelters.

Some of these recommendations could also be applied to housing development in general. Los Angeles’ affordability problems are themselves a product of zoning laws that limit where housing can be built, lengthy permitting processes that drag out the approval of what housing is allowed, and state environmental laws that allow project opponents to cynically delay development.

Ensuring that Prop HHH projects don’t run into these roadblocks, as the controller’s audit has recommended, is a good idea. Removing these obstacles for market-rate housing as well might mean fewer people would need to rely on the government to house them in the first place.

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Trump’s Nearly $1 Trillion Deficit Is Worse Than a Broken Promise

One of the refrains from President Trump’s most ardent defenders—as well as from the president himself—is that he keeps his promises. For the last several years, the Republican National Committee, which serves as a de facto arm of the president’s political operation, has been touting “promises made, promises kept,” a phrase that the president has repeated at campaign stops and rallies. The website PromisesKept.com is operated by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. 

The idea behind the slogan is to combat the idea that Trump has few policy accomplishments, and to portray the president as someone who can be relied on to follow through on his campaign promises. He’s a president you can count on. 

Yet when it comes to the federal debt, Trump is clearly failing to live up to his own words. In April 2016, Trump told The Washington Post, “We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion debt.” And he believed he could make that happen in a relatively compressed time frame. “I think I could do it fairly quickly,” he said. How quickly? “I would say over a period of eight years.” 

Nearly three years into his presidency, however, the debt has risen to surpass $22 trillion. And federal budget deficits—the annual gap between revenues and spending—are growing ever larger, hitting levels not seen since the aftermath of the recession during President Obama’s first term. 

According to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the federal budget deficit for the 2019 fiscal year, which ended last month, was about $984 billion dollars. That just-shy-of-a-trillion dollar figure is higher than projected, and represents an increase of about 50 percent from when Trump took office, and an increase of about $200 billion from last year alone. It’s more than double the $442 billion deficit under Obama in 2015. 

In the macro, political-difference-making scheme of the universe, it is almost certainly futile to dwell on the question of how Republicans would have reacted to such debt-and-deficit totals under President Obama, and yet: Imagine how Republicans would have reacted to such debt-and-deficit totals under Obama.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine. We know. Because Republicans warned, loudly and repeatedly, that Obama’s deficits, which came in the aftermath of a nationwide economic slowdown, were apocalyptic, catastrophic, world ending, and so on and so forth. 

Yet here we are. Trump is president, and he has allowed the deficit to soar beyond the increases that were already projected to happen. And Republicans in Congress have reacted with muted concern at best, and more like a collective shrug. Trillion-dollar deficits under a Democrat were a national emergency. Trillion-dollar deficits under Trump are no biggie. It’s almost like the real problem, for many Republicans, wasn’t the deficit. 

Republicans in Congress, who manage the budget process and who have signed on to various deals that spend more on domestic spending (a Democratic priority) in order to secure more spending on defense spending (a Republican priority), are, of course, a big part of the problem. A president cannot unilaterally address the annual budget deficit without significant help from the legislature.

But part of the problem is that Trump, being Trump, thought he could. In the 2016 interview where he raised the possibility of eliminating federal debt in eight years, he said he could do it through altering foreign trade deals. “The power is trade,” he said. “Our deals are so bad.” Trump said he would renegotiate trade deals with China, in particular, suggesting that doing so would eliminate federal debt. 

In many ways, that was the most telling part of Trump’s response. He appears to have confused the foreign trade deficit with the federal budget deficit, a confusion that he has stubbornly held onto throughout his time as president. In the meantime, both the budget deficit and the trade deficit have increased. Trump has failed on both measures. And, as with his confusion about the budget deficit, his trade agenda has been driven by false claims and deep misconceptions about how trade works. 

Trump’s nearly trillion-dollar deficits help reveal a deeper problem with the president, one that simple arguments about promises kept or unkept can sometimes fail to capture. It’s not just that Trump can’t be counted on to live up to his word. It’s that Trump can’t even be counted on to comprehend the promises he’s made.

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Trump’s Nearly $1 Trillion Deficit Is Worse Than a Broken Promise

One of the refrains from President Trump’s most ardent defenders—as well as from the president himself—is that he keeps his promises. For the last several years, the Republican National Committee, which serves as a de facto arm of the president’s political operation, has been touting “promises made, promises kept,” a phrase that the president has repeated at campaign stops and rallies. The website PromisesKept.com is operated by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. 

The idea behind the slogan is to combat the idea that Trump has few policy accomplishments, and to portray the president as someone who can be relied on to follow through on his campaign promises. He’s a president you can count on. 

Yet when it comes to the federal debt, Trump is clearly failing to live up to his own words. In April 2016, Trump told The Washington Post, “We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion debt.” And he believed he could make that happen in a relatively compressed time frame. “I think I could do it fairly quickly,” he said. How quickly? “I would say over a period of eight years.” 

Nearly three years into his presidency, however, the debt has risen to surpass $22 trillion. And federal budget deficits—the annual gap between revenues and spending—are growing ever larger, hitting levels not seen since the aftermath of the recession during President Obama’s first term. 

According to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the federal budget deficit for the 2019 fiscal year, which ended last month, was about $984 billion dollars. That just-shy-of-a-trillion dollar figure is higher than projected, and represents an increase of about 50 percent from when Trump took office, and an increase of about $200 billion from last year alone. It’s more than double the $442 billion deficit under Obama in 2015. 

In the macro, political-difference-making scheme of the universe, it is almost certainly futile to dwell on the question of how Republicans would have reacted to such debt-and-deficit totals under President Obama, and yet: Imagine how Republicans would have reacted to such debt-and-deficit totals under Obama.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine. We know. Because Republicans warned, loudly and repeatedly, that Obama’s deficits, which came in the aftermath of a nationwide economic slowdown, were apocalyptic, catastrophic, world ending, and so on and so forth. 

Yet here we are. Trump is president, and he has allowed the deficit to soar beyond the increases that were already projected to happen. And Republicans in Congress have reacted with muted concern at best, and more like a collective shrug. Trillion-dollar deficits under a Democrat were a national emergency. Trillion-dollar deficits under Trump are no biggie. It’s almost like the real problem, for many Republicans, wasn’t the deficit. 

Republicans in Congress, who manage the budget process and who have signed on to various deals that spend more on domestic spending (a Democratic priority) in order to secure more spending on defense spending (a Republican priority), are, of course, a big part of the problem. A president cannot unilaterally address the annual budget deficit without significant help from the legislature.

But part of the problem is that Trump, being Trump, thought he could. In the 2016 interview where he raised the possibility of eliminating federal debt in eight years, he said he could do it through altering foreign trade deals. “The power is trade,” he said. “Our deals are so bad.” Trump said he would renegotiate trade deals with China, in particular, suggesting that doing so would eliminate federal debt. 

In many ways, that was the most telling part of Trump’s response. He appears to have confused the foreign trade deficit with the federal budget deficit, a confusion that he has stubbornly held onto throughout his time as president. In the meantime, both the budget deficit and the trade deficit have increased. Trump has failed on both measures. And, as with his confusion about the budget deficit, his trade agenda has been driven by false claims and deep misconceptions about how trade works. 

Trump’s nearly trillion-dollar deficits help reveal a deeper problem with the president, one that simple arguments about promises kept or unkept can sometimes fail to capture. It’s not just that Trump can’t be counted on to live up to his word. It’s that Trump can’t even be counted on to comprehend the promises he’s made.

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Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! The October Term 2020 of FantasySCOTUS is now in session

I am honored to open up the 10th Season of FantasySCOTUS. I launched the site back in 2009 when I was still clerking. Now, a decade later, thousands of Court Watchers have made their predictions. Sign up today at FantasySCOTUS.net to predict the outcome of all the cases this term, including the three Title VII cases: Bostock, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, and Zarda.

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Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! The October Term 2020 of FantasySCOTUS is now in session

I am honored to open up the 10th Season of FantasySCOTUS. I launched the site back in 2009 when I was still clerking. Now, a decade later, thousands of Court Watchers have made their predictions. Sign up today at FantasySCOTUS.net to predict the outcome of all the cases this term, including the three Title VII cases: Bostock, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, and Zarda.

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Bob Barr: Trump ‘Was Doing Precisely What a President Should Have Been Doing’ With Ukraine

Bob Barr, that Republican congressman turned Libertarian presidential candidate turned Newt Gingrich enthusiast, is no stranger to impeachment, having been an early backer of sacking Bill Clinton and later serving as one of the House managers during the Senate’s trial of the 42nd president. In a new Daily Caller op-ed, Barr draws on that experience to issue a pre-emptive exoneration of Donald Trump: “It is clear that no federal laws were broken and nothing close to an impeachable offense took place.”

The definition of “impeachable offense” is inherently slippery. As Jacob Sullum has reminded us, “impeachment does not require provable statutory violations,” and “‘High crimes and misdemeanors'” include violations of the public trust that do not necessarily involve breaking the law.” In other words, it’s in the eye of the (congressional) beholder.

Barr, who sponsored an obstruction of justice impeachment inquiry months before Monica Lewinsky became a household name, looks upon Trump’s whistleblown July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and sees virtue, not vice.

“The president of the United States was doing precisely what a president should have been doing,” 2008’s fourth-place finisher asserts. “Trump emphasized that his administration was serious about getting to the bottom of corruption in Ukraine…and that a high government official in our country—former Vice President Joe Biden—had improperly interfered with that country’s effort to discover and prosecute corrupt acts.”

Trump’s track record of tackling global corruption, in Ukraine and elsewhere, is on the thin side. And Barr’s uncharitable rendering of Biden’s activities is not shared even by some Republican senators. “The whole world felt that this that [Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor] Shokin wasn’t doing a [good] enough job,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wis.) said last week. “So we were saying, ‘Hey, you’ve…got to rid yourself of corruption.'”

No matter. “Trump was acting responsibly and presidential,” Barr concludes. “He deserves our appreciation, not our opprobrium.”

Joining Barr in the Trump Appreciation Club is his 2008 running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, the millionaire Republican who became a conscientious Libertarian and finally an angry white male. Root last week wrote that what the Ukraine scandal is “really all about” is “the massive corruption, scandals, fraud and theft by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry.”

The whistleblower complaint, Root maintains, is a “premeditated hit job and Deep State coup against the president,” engineered by Democratic leaders who want to “knock him out of office before he can properly investigate and prosecute them.”

Like Barr, Root was a supporter of impeaching Bill Clinton, although he now characterizes that move as a “giant mistake.” The Nevada-based commentator also supported impeachment and “prison time for fraud” for his old Columbia University classmate, the “traitorous” Barack Obama.

The Barr/Root ticket got 0.4 percent of the national vote, slightly more than the L.P. received in 2000 and 2004. Gary Johnson and Judge Jim Gray boosted that total to 1 percent in 2012, then Johnson and Bill Weld nabbed 3.3 percent in 2016. Weld, who has followed the Barr/Root path into and back out of the Libertarian Party (and is waging a long shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination) supports not just impeachment but also a charge of treason against Trump.

Johnson, who has been keeping a low profile since his disappointing run for U.S. Senate last year, has expressed support for the first whistleblower, and retweeted this bit from the Libertarian Party:

Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), who is still not ruling out a run for the Libertarian Party’s 2020 nomination, famously became the only House Republican to support an impeachment inquiry back in May, then seven weeks later left the GOP altogether. He continues to tweet stuff like this:

Among the declared 2020 L.P. presidential candidates, there isn’t a lot of discernible enthusiasm for the I-word. At a pre-Ukraine-controversy debate I moderated in July, impeachment was only brought up once, by Kim Ruff, who described the House case (as it stood then) as “trumped-up nonsense,” and said that the constitutional tool would be much better deployed over the undeclared war in Yemen.

Here are boiled down versions of what the five candidates on stage said when I asked them to name “the worst aspect of the Trump presidency so far.”

Arvin Vohra: “His failure to withdraw from NATO….If I’m president, I’m going to bring all the troops home, I’m going to shut down every military base.”

Dan “Taxation Is Theft” Behrman: “You can’t tell [Trump supporters] that Trump is bad, you can’t tell them that he has done anything wrong; he is God as far as they’re concerned. What we can do is we can say, ‘Look, he’s done some great things, but we can do so much more, and he’s not willing to go there.”

Adam Kokesh: “The worst thing about the Trump presidency is the presidency part. We spend all this time arguing about personalities and policies and who should sit on the throne, and we never stop to ask: Why do we have the throne in the first place?”

Max Abramson: “Of course there’s the refusal to bring the troops home…My reason for running for office is to bring the troops home, end the wars overseas.”

Kim Ruff: “To my mind, probably the worst thing that Trump has done, among many things that he’s done poorly, is continue the unconstitutional war in Yemen. But in order to go after him now—which is totally an impeachable offense—we would have to own the fact that Obama started it, and admit the fact that we’ve continued this from president to president.”

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Bob Barr: Trump ‘Was Doing Precisely What a President Should Have Been Doing’ With Ukraine

Bob Barr, that Republican congressman turned Libertarian presidential candidate turned Newt Gingrich enthusiast, is no stranger to impeachment, having been an early backer of sacking Bill Clinton and later serving as one of the House managers during the Senate’s trial of the 42nd president. In a new Daily Caller op-ed, Barr draws on that experience to issue a pre-emptive exoneration of Donald Trump: “It is clear that no federal laws were broken and nothing close to an impeachable offense took place.”

The definition of “impeachable offense” is inherently slippery. As Jacob Sullum has reminded us, “impeachment does not require provable statutory violations,” and “‘High crimes and misdemeanors'” include violations of the public trust that do not necessarily involve breaking the law.” In other words, it’s in the eye of the (congressional) beholder.

Barr, who sponsored an obstruction of justice impeachment inquiry months before Monica Lewinsky became a household name, looks upon Trump’s whistleblown July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and sees virtue, not vice.

“The president of the United States was doing precisely what a president should have been doing,” 2008’s fourth-place finisher asserts. “Trump emphasized that his administration was serious about getting to the bottom of corruption in Ukraine…and that a high government official in our country—former Vice President Joe Biden—had improperly interfered with that country’s effort to discover and prosecute corrupt acts.”

Trump’s track record of tackling global corruption, in Ukraine and elsewhere, is on the thin side. And Barr’s uncharitable rendering of Biden’s activities is not shared even by some Republican senators. “The whole world felt that this that [Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor] Shokin wasn’t doing a [good] enough job,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wis.) said last week. “So we were saying, ‘Hey, you’ve…got to rid yourself of corruption.'”

No matter. “Trump was acting responsibly and presidential,” Barr concludes. “He deserves our appreciation, not our opprobrium.”

Joining Barr in the Trump Appreciation Club is his 2008 running mate, Wayne Allyn Root, the millionaire Republican who became a conscientious Libertarian and finally an angry white male. Root last week wrote that what the Ukraine scandal is “really all about” is “the massive corruption, scandals, fraud and theft by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry.”

The whistleblower complaint, Root maintains, is a “premeditated hit job and Deep State coup against the president,” engineered by Democratic leaders who want to “knock him out of office before he can properly investigate and prosecute them.”

Like Barr, Root was a supporter of impeaching Bill Clinton, although he now characterizes that move as a “giant mistake.” The Nevada-based commentator also supported impeachment and “prison time for fraud” for his old Columbia University classmate, the “traitorous” Barack Obama.

The Barr/Root ticket got 0.4 percent of the national vote, slightly more than the L.P. received in 2000 and 2004. Gary Johnson and Judge Jim Gray boosted that total to 1 percent in 2012, then Johnson and Bill Weld nabbed 3.3 percent in 2016. Weld, who has followed the Barr/Root path into and back out of the Libertarian Party (and is waging a long shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination) supports not just impeachment but also a charge of treason against Trump.

Johnson, who has been keeping a low profile since his disappointing run for U.S. Senate last year, has expressed support for the first whistleblower, and retweeted this bit from the Libertarian Party:

Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), who is still not ruling out a run for the Libertarian Party’s 2020 nomination, famously became the only House Republican to support an impeachment inquiry back in May, then seven weeks later left the GOP altogether. He continues to tweet stuff like this:

Among the declared 2020 L.P. presidential candidates, there isn’t a lot of discernible enthusiasm for the I-word. At a pre-Ukraine-controversy debate I moderated in July, impeachment was only brought up once, by Kim Ruff, who described the House case (as it stood then) as “trumped-up nonsense,” and said that the constitutional tool would be much better deployed over the undeclared war in Yemen.

Here are boiled down versions of what the five candidates on stage said when I asked them to name “the worst aspect of the Trump presidency so far.”

Arvin Vohra: “His failure to withdraw from NATO….If I’m president, I’m going to bring all the troops home, I’m going to shut down every military base.”

Dan “Taxation Is Theft” Behrman: “You can’t tell [Trump supporters] that Trump is bad, you can’t tell them that he has done anything wrong; he is God as far as they’re concerned. What we can do is we can say, ‘Look, he’s done some great things, but we can do so much more, and he’s not willing to go there.”

Adam Kokesh: “The worst thing about the Trump presidency is the presidency part. We spend all this time arguing about personalities and policies and who should sit on the throne, and we never stop to ask: Why do we have the throne in the first place?”

Max Abramson: “Of course there’s the refusal to bring the troops home…My reason for running for office is to bring the troops home, end the wars overseas.”

Kim Ruff: “To my mind, probably the worst thing that Trump has done, among many things that he’s done poorly, is continue the unconstitutional war in Yemen. But in order to go after him now—which is totally an impeachable offense—we would have to own the fact that Obama started it, and admit the fact that we’ve continued this from president to president.”

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Miami Beach’s $100,000 Fines for Airbnb Rentals Are Illegal, Court Rules

Massive fines levied against Miami Beach homeowners who rented their properties out via Airbnb are illegal under state law, a Florida judge ruled on Monday.

Miami Beach had imposed huge fines in an attempt to prevent residents from offering short-term rentals. The city argued that the massive penalties—ranging from $20,000 to $100,000—were necessary because smaller fines had been insufficient to stop homes from being rented on Airbnb and similar services. The city has also considered jailing residents who violate a ban on short-term rentals.

But Miami Beach’s crackdown on Airbnb is “in jarring conflict” with a state law capping municipal fines at $1,000 per day, Judge Michael Hanzman ruled.

“The caps set by the legislature…may not in the city’s view be adequate to force (or motivate) Miami Beach’s wealthiest property owners to comply with these ordinances,” Hanzman wrote. “The city may (or may not) be correct, but that is a matter it must take up in Tallahassee.”

Hanzman struck down the city’s ban on Airbnb as “illegal and unenforceable,” which means short-term rentals are once again legal in Miami Beach—at least until the city council approves a new ban, which seems likely. For now, that’s good news for property owners like Natalie Nichols, the longtime Miami Beach resident who filed the lawsuit which resulted in Monday’s ruling.

“This ruling vindicates the property rights of all Miami Beach homeowners who share their homes as short-term rentals,” said Matt Miller, an attorney with the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which was representing Nichols. “Home-sharers in Miami Beach no longer have to fear that they will end up in financial ruin for exercising this essential property right.”

Miami Beach’s aggressive policing of short-term rentals has made headlines for years.

But the question of whether the city was allowed to impose five- and six-figure fines for short-term rentals always seemed like a pretty straightforward one. Florida state law is explicit: municipalities may not impose fines of more than $1,000 per day—no small punishment for most people. Indeed, even one Miami Beach city councilman (who supported the city’s massive fines) described the penalties as “grossly disproportional but not excessive due to the rental rates that can be commanded here.”

The fines are only part of the story. Last year, Miami Beach officials revoked a certificate of occupancy from a home being offered as a short-term rental and ordered utility services to shut off electricity, sewage, and water to the property. The city forced the property owner to prove his home wasn’t being used for short-term rentals before it would restore his utilities.

But after this week’s ringing defeat in court, Miami Beach officials should recognize that their war on Airbnb is completely out of bounds. Instead of targeting law-abiding property owners with massive fines, the city should go after nuisance rentals (if there are any) using existing laws meant to target specific problematic behavior. Otherwise, the city should mind its own business and let Miami Beach homeowners do as they please with their property.

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Miami Beach’s $100,000 Fines for Airbnb Rentals Are Illegal, Court Rules

Massive fines levied against Miami Beach homeowners who rented their properties out via Airbnb are illegal under state law, a Florida judge ruled on Monday.

Miami Beach had imposed huge fines in an attempt to prevent residents from offering short-term rentals. The city argued that the massive penalties—ranging from $20,000 to $100,000—were necessary because smaller fines had been insufficient to stop homes from being rented on Airbnb and similar services. The city has also considered jailing residents who violate a ban on short-term rentals.

But Miami Beach’s crackdown on Airbnb is “in jarring conflict” with a state law capping municipal fines at $1,000 per day, Judge Michael Hanzman ruled.

“The caps set by the legislature…may not in the city’s view be adequate to force (or motivate) Miami Beach’s wealthiest property owners to comply with these ordinances,” Hanzman wrote. “The city may (or may not) be correct, but that is a matter it must take up in Tallahassee.”

Hanzman struck down the city’s ban on Airbnb as “illegal and unenforceable,” which means short-term rentals are once again legal in Miami Beach—at least until the city council approves a new ban, which seems likely. For now, that’s good news for property owners like Natalie Nichols, the longtime Miami Beach resident who filed the lawsuit which resulted in Monday’s ruling.

“This ruling vindicates the property rights of all Miami Beach homeowners who share their homes as short-term rentals,” said Matt Miller, an attorney with the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which was representing Nichols. “Home-sharers in Miami Beach no longer have to fear that they will end up in financial ruin for exercising this essential property right.”

Miami Beach’s aggressive policing of short-term rentals has made headlines for years.

But the question of whether the city was allowed to impose five- and six-figure fines for short-term rentals always seemed like a pretty straightforward one. Florida state law is explicit: municipalities may not impose fines of more than $1,000 per day—no small punishment for most people. Indeed, even one Miami Beach city councilman (who supported the city’s massive fines) described the penalties as “grossly disproportional but not excessive due to the rental rates that can be commanded here.”

The fines are only part of the story. Last year, Miami Beach officials revoked a certificate of occupancy from a home being offered as a short-term rental and ordered utility services to shut off electricity, sewage, and water to the property. The city forced the property owner to prove his home wasn’t being used for short-term rentals before it would restore his utilities.

But after this week’s ringing defeat in court, Miami Beach officials should recognize that their war on Airbnb is completely out of bounds. Instead of targeting law-abiding property owners with massive fines, the city should go after nuisance rentals (if there are any) using existing laws meant to target specific problematic behavior. Otherwise, the city should mind its own business and let Miami Beach homeowners do as they please with their property.

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