On February 15, 2023 the Windsor Town Council met to discuss short term rentals within city limits.

In a surpising turn of events, council members are leaning toward banning non-hosted short term rentals in residential neighborhoods. Leaving only commercial zones to be allowed for non-hosted rentals.

Even hosted rentals aren’t safe with Sam Salmon stating he did not think that homeowners should be able to live in ADUs and rent out their main house, which was previously allowed. Expect this topic to be discussed at the Town Councils March 1st meeting when they finalize this ordinance.

Here is a map of the zoning in Windsor.

Here is the video of the February 15th meeting.

With the Windsor meeting as the first of 2023 to address short-term rentals, we still have Santa Rosa and Sonoma County that will be meeting later this year to adopt or revise their ordinances. Hopefully this does not set the tone for these jurisdictions to follow Windsor’s lead.

Having not had any sort of regulations previously, both Santa Rosa and Windsor adopted moratoriums last year to “combat” the housing crisis and out of control short-term rentals. I hardly consider these jurisdictions as over run by short-term rentals with less than 1% of the housing stock being dedicated to this purpose. While it is easy to say we are in a housing crisis, a more apt description would be a building crisis since building has been at a standstill in Sonoma County since 2000 and was only exacerbated by the loss of 5,000 homes in the 2017 fires.

As a hospitality driven area these towns would see fiscal benefits from transient occupancy tax revenue from short-term rentals as well as providing safe havens for locals in times of natural disasters. Many short-term rentals housed displaced families during wildfires over the last 6 years while residents re-built or simply made repairs from fire/flood damage.