Governments on the North Fork are hashing out the best way to address the preponderance of short-term rentals in the upcoming weeks.
The public will have a chance this Thursday to weigh in on the Village of Greenport’s latest attempt to regulate the rental of private homes for short stays, which have been made ubiquitous throughout the world by websites like airBNB and VRBO.
Meanwhile, the Southold Town Board is expected to hold a Sept. 30 code committee meeting to discuss changes to its code, which currently sets a minimum stay at 14 days but has proved to be difficult to enforce. A task force last year recommended a permitting process to allow individual people to provide short-term rentals in their homes.
Pictured Above: Greenport Village will hold a public hearing Thursday on a proposed new short-term rental code.
While both Greenport and Southold have long been areas where the housing mix has included seasonal and full-time residents, short-term rental websites that make it easy to pair property owners with renters have led to the commercialization of residential neighborhoods and decreased the stock of long-term housing, according to the town. Southold’s task force found last year that more than 40 short-term rentals listed in Southold are listed by just four property management companies.
The Greenport Code
Greenport’s latest crack at a proposed short-term rental code will be up for public hearing at the Village Board’s 6 p.m. work session on Thursday, Sept. 18.
It’s an attempt to establish regulations that prioritize the residential use of homes, require short-term rentals to be in properties that are “consistently used as residences, and “discourage the circumvention of rental housing and zoning regulations through absentee ownership and commercial exploitation of residential properties,” according to the text of the proposed legislation introduced at a special meeting Sept. 5.
The proposed code would require permits for both long-term short-term rentals. Short-term rentals would be defined as having a term of less than 30 consecutive days. The Village Board has been revamping its proposed code since a contentious public hearing on an earlier code proposal in the summer of 2024.
The code as currently drafted would require that dwellings used as short-term rentals meet eligibility qualifications that include that the rental is not for the entire dwelling unit and is “only incidental to residential use.” At least one bedroom in the unit would need to be reserved for use by an owner or resident tenant, and the owner or resident tenant will be required to be “physically living on-site at such eligible dwelling unit (including overnight) during the period of any short-term rental.” Only one such permit would be issued per property.
The permit requirements would phased in after the adoption of the code —enforcement would begin 60 days after its adoption, and anyone who applied for a permit within that 60 days would be eligible for an extension to 120 days.
If adopted as currently drafted, the code would also prohibit short-term rental permits from being issued in accessory buildings or for use as employee housing, and would prohibit new short-term rental permits from being issued in the village’s Commercial Retail zoning district. The employee housing provision would also be phased in for between 60 and 120 days after the law is adopted. Long-term rental permits would include employee housing.
Penalties for violations would range from $500 for the first violation within an 18 month period to up to $5,000 for the third violation within an 18-month period.
Short term rental applications would need to include a floor plan, a list of methods of advertising and listing the property for rent and provide documentation that the property is either their principal residence or is leased to a resident tenant.
Southold Town Gets to Work
In August of 2024, a Southold Town task force recommended that the town create a special permitting process for property rentals of shorter than 30 days, after several years of difficulties of managing its current law banning rentals of less than 14 days.
The task force proposed the town issue permits for homeowners wishing to rent their primary residence for less than 30 days, and instate a lottery for people wishing to rent out a property they own that is not their primary residence, capping the total number of short-term rentals in non-primary residences at 1 percent of the houses in each hamlet.
The Southold Town Board has tentatively scheduled a code committee meeting for Tuesday, Sept. 30 at 2 p.m. to discuss a new proposed short-term rental code, which is expected to be based on the task force’s recommendations.
The Southold Town Attorney’s office had said this spring that, after instituting new software to track short term rentals, it planned to send letters to people renting their property letting them know the town knows they’re in violation of the code, hopefully in advance of the summer season.
But Assistant Town Attorney Ben Johnson told the Town Board at its Sept. 9 work session that his office is “starting the letter campaign shortly and that is expected to drive some kind of compliance.”
We’ll have more details as they become available.
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