Rental violation enforcement continues in city

By Grace Lovins

Birmingham city staff reported three new rental code violations during the Monday, July 27, city commission meeting, outlining the city’s recent enforcement of rental property violations and briefly discussing the planning board’s progress on developing ordinance language that limits short-term rentals.

City Manager Jana Ecker said there was little new activity to report since the commission’s previous update. The building department issued three violations, all involving long-term rental properties whose owners failed to obtain a rental license before the April 15 deadline.

Ecker said the department is continuing to search for unlicensed properties and pursue the removal of illegal listings from short-term rental websites, including Airbnb and VRBO. The report included in the meeting packet also noted that police received no calls for service related to short-term rentals during the reporting period.

The planning board is scheduled to hold a public hearing August 12 on proposed ordinance amendments that would establish a 30-day minimum rental period in most city zoning districts. The current proposal would exclude the downtown overlay and mixed-use in retail district, and would provide no exceptions to the minimum rental period in the districts where it applies.

Commissioner Therese Longe said, based on her notes from watching the meeting, planning board members had concerns about whether the proposed legal mechanism, based on a Supreme Court decision, could apply in downtown and mixed-use districts because those areas are not residentially zoned. She noted that attorneys were not present at the planning board meeting to respond to those concerns.

Longe said the board also plans to ask for permission to study possible exemptions for resident homeowners and further examine whether the legal precedent could apply within the Rail District.