Opinion: New Haven’s Short-Term Rental Rules Get The Design Right

By Murray Cox

I didn’t set out to write about New Haven. Recently, New Haven Is Not For Sale, a coalition of local organizations led by New Haven Rising, asked my project, Inside Airbnb, for its data on short-term rentals in the city, as hundreds of researchers, journalists and community groups do every year. The data showed years of growth with almost no regulation. Once I had read the proposed ordinance, we agreed it would help New Haven residents to hear what the numbers show and what the ordinance would do, from someone who has studied short-term rentals and how cities around the world regulate them.

Since 2015 I have tracked listings and interviewed the policymakers who write the rules and the enforcement teams who make them work. New Haven’s alders will soon vote on OR-2026-0039. It would end short-term rentals of 30 days or less in homes that no one lives in, and keep home-sharing legal for residents who rent rooms in the homes they live in. From where I sit, the proposal from Alders Frank Douglass, Mandy Martinelli and Leland Moore is good for New Haven and good for housing.

First, some facts. This month Inside Airbnb published New Haven as its own city for the first time, with public data and maps by neighborhood at insideairbnb.com/new-haven. The count found 784 New Haven listings on Airbnb, not including other listings on popular websites like Vrbo, Booking.com, and FurnishedFinder. Almost all of them, 764 (97 percent), are short-term rentals, taking bookings of 30 nights or less, and 481 of those (63 percent) are entire homes. These are the very listings the ordinance covers. Inside Airbnb’s earliest New Haven figures, from October 2015, counted 93 entire-home listings. This October there were 482, more than five times as many. The number rose 18 percent in the past year alone.

They are not mostly spare rooms or a family’s place rented out on graduation weekend. Seven in ten of New Haven’s entire-home listings are run by hosts with more than one listing in the city.

More than a third are run by hosts with five or more. They work as hotel rooms on residential streets, concentrated in Wooster Square, Downtown, Dwight and East Rock. In Dwight, the count went from 9 to 55 in five years. Even the “rooms” are often not what they seem. More than 75 percent of the private room listings come from just 30 hosts offering three or more rooms each, and New Haven’s largest host lists 45 rooms across six neighborhoods.

If the city does nothing, the numbers point one way: more homes turned into short-term rentals, and more of them in commercial hands.

With the expansion of the airport, Yale New Haven Hospital’s investment in medical tourism, and New Haven’s growing fame as a travel destination, this rapid-growth trajectory is likely to continue. To put these numbers into context, New Haven led the state by creating 3,535 new housing units between 2020 and 2025, an average of 707 new units per year. Short-term rental units are a meaningful chunk of housing, relative to what’s being built.

Home-sharing is not going away. Owners and long-term residents can still rent rooms in the home they live in, under a license and occupancy limits. Airbnb told the Independent last month that more than 40 percent of its hosts say the income helps them stay in their homes. Those are the hosts this ordinance keeps.

Cities that put housing first have drawn the same line, limiting short-term rentals to homes people actually live in. Toronto and Vancouver allow them only in a host’s primary residence, and Boston limits them to owner-occupied homes. Here in Connecticut, about 15 towns already have similar rules. As Vancouver’s mayor said before his council voted: “Hundreds of cities around the world are regulating short-term rentals … I can’t imagine doing nothing.”

The closest model is New York City. New Haven’s ordinance is built on the same mechanism as New York’s Local Law 18 of 2022. Hosts register, and platforms must check the registration before they can complete a booking. In New York, short-term listings fell from about 21,800 to about 4,500 within five months. By last year the city counted just 3,000 registered short-term rentals, against an estimated 60,000 illegal listings in 2018, “representing tens of thousands of critical housing units protected for long-term New York renters.” As the head of its enforcement office put it, “Local Law 18 is about prevention – and it’s working.”

Researchers have measured what is at stake. In New York, one study estimated that short-term rentals cost renters $2.7 billion, far more than hosts gained. In Ontario, McGill University researchers found that primary-residence rules like New Haven’s are saving renters more than CAD $1 billion a year. And in Los Angeles County, cities that adopted home-sharing ordinances saw listings fall by about half and rents and house prices fall about 2 percent.

Short-term rentals did not create New Haven’s housing crisis, and this ordinance won’t solve it on its own. But compared to the difficulty in gathering federal and state funds for housing development, keeping existing homes as homes is the one step available now that costs almost nothing. Every month of delay leaves these homes off the market and lets even more disappear.

Sometimes it’s not only homes that are lost but the people in them. At the Legislation Committee hearing, an Edgewood homeowner described a neighbor who was priced out and whose apartment became an Airbnb, and renters said they fear their own landlords will do the same.

What other cities teach is that design matters. Short-term rental rules should serve a city’s housing policy, and keep residential homes residential. New Haven’s ordinance does that with one clear test: does the host live here?

That design is worth protecting, and so is what the proposal leaves out. It doesn’t exempt owners who rent out a second apartment in the building they live in. That may sound strict, but each of those apartments is still a home off the market, one a New Haven family could rent. Nor does it exempt hosts by how many units they run. In New Haven, hosts with three or fewer listings hold more than half the entire homes the ordinance covers. Every exemption that lets a whole apartment leave the housing market makes a rule like this weaker and harder to enforce, and those exemptions undermine the potential of this legislation to save residents money.

New Haven is not moving recklessly. With the proposed ordinance as written, it is catching up with cities around the world, big and small, that faced the same choice and chose to keep homes as homes.

See the data yourself: insideairbnb.com/new-haven.

Murray Cox is the founder of Inside Airbnb, an independent, not-for-profit project that has published short-term rental data on cities around the world since 2015. He currently lives in the City of Newburgh, New York. Inside Airbnb is not funded by the hotel industry and received no payment for the New Haven data or for this piece. The New Haven figures come from Inside Airbnb data.