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August 2, 2024

CT Supreme Court ruling makes AirBnB, VRBO rentals easier

DAVE WURTZEL / CONNECTICUT PUBLIC The Connecticut State Supreme Court in August 2021.
By Ginny Monk, CT Mirror

A state Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this week could make it easier for Connecticut property owners to use homes as short-term rentals on platforms such as VRBO and AirBnb, a concern for some advocates amid a statewide housing crisis.

The state’s highest court said in a 5-2 ruling Monday that a “residence” can include short-term rentals and doesn’t require a degree of permanency, reversing 2018 zoning regulations in Pine Orchard, a borough of Branford.

The ruling is the latest in local and state governments’ years-long quest to regulate short-term rentals so they can push back against disruptions in neighborhoods and a market that takes up housing stock.

Pine Orchard, which has its own zoning enforcement officer, established zoning regulations where the property in question is located. The district allows several uses of buildings, including “single family dwelling.”

Frances Wihbey bought a single-family property in that zoning district in 2005 and started using it for short-term rentals on the platform VRBO. After neighbors began to complain, the borough amended its zoning policy to prohibit single-family dwelling rentals for less than 30 days.

In 2019, Pine Orchard issued Wihbey a cease-and-desist order.

Wihbey appealed it to the borough’s government, then further up through the court system.

The legal question centered around whether a “residence” or “home” means there is some degree of permanency. Justices considered whether the 1994 regulations, which were still in place when Wihbey bought the home, allowed for short-term rentals.

The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson, found that the amount of time someone stays at a property doesn’t matter for the legal definition of “residence.” The town and neighbors argued that the term “residence” means a place where a person lives with a degree of permanency.

“Although we agree with the defendants that this characteristic can be attributed to a ‘‘home’’ and a ‘‘residence,’’ we do not agree that those terms necessarily refer to places where an individual will live for any particular length of time,” the Court’s majority opinion states.

The justices in the minority — Justices Andrew J. McDonald and Steven D. Ecker — said that the terms do imply that a person lives there for a longer amount of time.

“It is hard to imagine a person claiming with a straight face that he or she made a reservation at a local hotel when visiting a family member for a weekend and properly characterizing it as his or her ‘‘residence’’ for the thirty-six hours that the person was in town,” the justices wrote. 

Attorneys representing the parties in the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Municipalities across the country are grappling with the impact of short-term rentals in the housing market. The issue is particularly prominent at vacation destinations including along Connecticut’s shoreline.

The state lacks thousands of units of housing that are affordable and available to its lowest-income renters, and in recent years, the cost of housing has risen across markets.

During the last legislative session, state lawmakers passed a sweeping housing bill that included a measure to strengthen towns’ authority to adopt ordinances around short-term rentals.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said in a written statement Wednesday that the state Supreme Court’s ruling will exacerbate Connecticut’s affordable housing shortage.

“This ruling makes it clear that we need to do more than tinker with housing policy if we want to address this issue, and the legislature will need to consider creative policies to prevent the erosion of our communities by corporations seeking to make a buck at our communities’ expense,” Duff said in his statement.

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