Letter to the Editor - The Millerton News - 7-27-23

Living next to a short term rental

So, Millbrook and the Town of Washington are formulating plans to codify short-term rentals, because studies have shown them beneficial to local shops and restaurants. In adding their blessings to the depressingly transactional devolution of our residential neighborhoods, our local boards are asserting, “Your home is not just your castle, it’s your cash cow. Better yet, it’s our cash cow! Everybody wins!”

Everybody, that is, except those of us who reside next to those STRs. We lose the peace-and-privacy lottery, no matter what regulatory guardrails are put in place.

I would bet my next property tax payment that Mike Murphy and the architects of the STR plans have never had the misfortune of living next to a short-term rental.

They probably haven’t experienced first-hand that sinking feeling, realizing you’ve moved in next to a hospitality operation run out of the owner’s Manhattan apartment, when you thought you had bought into a quiet country neighborhood with steady neighbors that have your back. Or the headache of raucous dinner parties on the neighbor’s deck, whose sound tunnel into your yard is so acute that you could transcribe entire conversations from your porch. Or enduring the marathon barking of agitated dogs left behind in a strange environment for a day while their owners tour the Hudson Valley.

  They couldn’t understand what it’s like to look out upon a grotesquely ugly shale-and-mud hillside, Gerry-built to support a new swimming pool whose chemicals get emptied into the wetlands in the fall. This godforsaken pool was ostensibly installed for “personal use” by our neighbor, who inaugurated her STR in 2012, but has afforded her the opportunity to up her daily fee and make the property more competitive in a burgeoning market. This nightmare of spit-and-Scotch-tape construction and kamikaze tree butchering was greenlit without a plan by John Parisi and a reckless zoning board, who, deaf to my family’s privacy and environmental concerns, helped the owner do an end-run around wetlands and STR ordinances to obtain a building variance.

These are precisely the sort of horror stories that occur when local boards advantage the town’s business interests and the self-interest of its occasional residents over the life quality of its year-round residents. STR permit planners would argue that they are putting elaborate curbs in place to minimize abuse. But who, at day’s end, is going to enforce these rules? Inevitably, it will fall on the reluctant shoulders of neighboring homeowners, who never signed on to the thankless job of policing the short-term rental offender next door.

The Millerton News reports that a resolution will be adopted in August, followed by another public hearing. But these are just formalities. When the bottom line is the town’s bottom line, the board’s going to do what it’s going to do. So, go ahead and repaint that vacant bedroom. Renovate that Florida room. Rent that house and rake in that revenue for you, the Village and the Town. It’s not just your right. It’s your civic duty. Damn the neighbors, full speed ahead!

Jan Stuart

Millbrook