Notes from the LabField Entry – April 9, 2026
Short-term rentals have become the default villain in conversations about housing affordability. But what if the story is more complicated, and the real culprit is hiding in plain sight?
Bring up short-term rentals in almost any housing policy conversation, and it happens within minutes. Someone says it. They’re causing the housing crisis. The room nods. The conversation moves on.
It lands with the authority of settled fact: a clean, shareable explanation for a problem that is anything but clean. And that’s precisely why it deserves scrutiny.
The appeal is understandable. Short-term rentals are tangible. They’re countable. They generate data, complaints, and headlines. In a policy environment where everyone is under pressure to demonstrate action, they offer something rare: a visible target.
But visibility and culpability are not the same thing.
What the report from Oregon actually shows
Recent conversations with leadership at the state level in Oregon tell a more complicated story. When they look at what’s actually happening across their communities, short-term rentals do appear. Their impact on housing availability is real…small.
“What showed up more clearly was something we don’t spend nearly as much time talking about: second homes.”
Properties that aren’t rented. Aren’t occupied most of the year. Aren’t part of the visitor economy in any active way. They exist, they hold value, and they sit almost entirely outside the systems we use to track housing impact.
No listings. No reviews. No stream of data points for analysts to interrogate. Second homes don’t generate the same friction in public spaces, so they don’t draw the same level of scrutiny, even when they’re occupying the same finite supply of housing.
~14 Million
Second homes in the US – mostly untracked in housing policy
Low Visibility
Second homes relative to short-term rentals in policy data
High Pressure
Policy focus on short-term rentals despite mixed evidence
We regulate what we can see
This is not a new problem in policy. We build frameworks around what’s measurable, and we measure what leaves a trail. Short-term rentals are extraordinarily visible: they appear in permit applications, platform dashboards, neighborhood complaints, and council meeting agendas. They are easy to count and, by extension, easier to regulate.
Second homes are quieter. They don’t create the same day-to-day friction: no check-ins, no strangers in the neighborhood, no noise complaints at 2 a.m. So they don’t draw the same attention, even when their long-term effect on housing supply may be more significant.
The result is a policy environment that is highly responsive to one part of the system and essentially blind to another.
"When the most visible part of a system becomes the center of the solution, we risk designing policy around a version of the problem that feels complete, but isn’t."
The gap that policies aren’t closing
For destination organizations navigating this pressure right now, the dynamic is genuinely difficult. Residents are frustrated. Housing feels tight. There is political and community pressure to respond. Short-term rental regulation offers a concrete framework, something that can be adjusted, communicated, and pointed to as evidence of action.
The problem emerges over time. Operators feel increasingly targeted. Residents don’t always feel the relief that was promised. The policy expands, but the underlying issue doesn’t resolve as cleanly as expected. That gap — between the scale of the intervention and the scale of the relief — is a signal worth paying attention to.
It suggests we may have made short-term rentals carry more of the story than they actually own.
The questions worth asking
None of this is an argument that short-term rentals have no impact. In some markets, that impact is significant and well-documented. The question is whether we have correctly sized that impact relative to other forces – and whether the policies being built reflect the full picture or just the parts that are easiest to track.
A more complete analysis would ask: Where is housing actually being removed from circulation? Which properties are actively contributing to the local economy, and which are simply holding space? Are we measuring the full system, or just the parts that generate data?
These are harder questions. They don’t resolve into simple dashboards or clean regulatory frameworks. But they’re the questions that get closer to the actual problem, and closer to solutions that residents will actually feel.
Right now, we’ve gotten very good at acting on the parts of the housing system we can see. The rest is sitting there – a little harder to quantify, and a little easier to overlook. That’s exactly where the harder work begins.
Hosts & Home Teams is a living lab addressing The Host Gap and the economic benefits of alignment. Join us at the lab, Jul 24, 2026. HostsAndHomeTeams.com
