NAHANT — The town’s Short Term Rental Committee met Tuesday night to discuss primary guidelines for the rentals that would make them legal and ensure that they remained in use for primarily residential purposes.
The guidelines were developed by Committee Secretary Robert Tibbo, and express the body’s goal that the rentals “not be a detriment to the character and livability of the surrounding residential neighborhood.”
The committee began with defining what a short term rental means in Nahant. The preliminary official definition is “any rental of a residential dwelling unit, or of a bedroom within a dwelling unit, in exchange for payment, as residential accommodations for a duration of less than 30 consecutive days.”
Parking stimulated an extended discussion at the meeting and seems to be the main issue that might cause impediments to legally license a short term rental in Nahant. Participants of the meeting said that due to difficulties with street parking, rules should be established to tie the number of bedrooms in a rental and the number of available off-street parking spaces.
“One parking space is required per one bedroom,” suggested Wayne Wilson, the town building inspector and chairman of the STR committee.
Some of the members of the public present at the meeting raised their concerns over the fact that the number of bedrooms might be too strictly tied to the number of parking spaces. They said that multigenerational families might need more bedrooms than the number of cars that they use.
The current owners and operators of short term rentals reasoned that it is usually sufficient for them to say to their short-term tenants that no street parking is available.
However, the committee members maintained that the rules are in place to make sure that the guests do not violate the norms of the community, if the owner or the operator of the property is not overseeing them.
Other members of the audience supported the committee by bringing to the attention of their neighbors the facts of disturbances caused by unregulated rentals.
“Being next door to a short term rental, we feel that we lost our privacy,” said Nahant resident Frank De Iulis, who also said that a property located next to his place is used as a short term rental and the six or so people who rent it for short periods of time, “bring in another ten people to have parties.”
“We feel that it’s a business. It’s no longer a residential property,” said De Iulis.
Oksana Kotkina can be reached at [email protected].
