On Aug. 1, a new pilot program launched in North Tahoe that pays homeowners up to $24,000 to rent long-term to locals.
The goal is to “unlock” homes that are sitting vacant in Lake Tahoe and alleviate some of the mounting pressure on local workers who are in need of places to live that they can afford on their wages.
So you are going to pay homeowners a bonus, on top of the unearned wealth they already enjoy, to rent to people whose wages are too low to allow them to pay market rate rent?
In North Lake Tahoe, 65% of single-family homes are second homes and short-term rentals, according to a 2021 Mountain Housing Council study. Many of those houses sit empty for the vast majority of the year. Meanwhile, at any given time, about 200 to 300 households who work in the Tahoe region are searching for housing,
Rather than reward rentiers for tying up valuable land and housing, the rents on which will not be spent in Lake Tahoe, why not tax them for the value of their land, the value that all the local people who can’t afford to live there created? Those property owners didn’t create that wealth. They may never have even have set foot in town or might have inherited that property. Meanwhile, the local economy is built on the backs of people who can’t actually enjoy the place where they live.