XMAS SANDWICH
It struck me that during the entire discussion about the ban of single-use plastic bottles, there was nothing said about enlisting Mammoth Lakes Tourism to run a marketing campaign on it.
After all, in MLT’s FY 2022-2023 annual report which was recently mailed out to every local post office box holder, Andrea Walker, owner of Stellar Brew, is quoted as saying, “Mammoth Lakes Tourism’s shift from attraction to education has made a huge impact with guests showing more respect to our staff and our natural surroundings.”
Wouldn’t it make far more sense to hype the positive and educate the public about the purity and excellent taste of our tap water versus … another ban?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to offer a complimentary reusable water bottle to every visitor? Just swing by the Forest Service Visitor Center on your way into town!
Hell, we have such an enormous marketing budget we could pay a guy to wear a sandwich board at the first traffic light in town from 8 to 4 every day.
Better yet, hire a guy to stand in the beverage aisle at Vons and shame/cajole people into not buying single-use plastic.
Oh right. Employees don’t do stuff like that these days. Because that would make them nervous or uncomfortable or, heaven forbid, productive.
Nope. They just sit slackjawed in front of laptops trying to think up “creative” social media posts.
Which happens, like, never.
Back to the sandwich board. It could read, “In Mammoth, our water is better than the water they bottle.”
And we would be telling them the truth.
Versus telling them we have lots of snow when we don’t.
Bans fit with the larger cultural theme, which is, “The only way I can get you to behave like I want you to behave is to mandate your behavior.”
Kinda like what they did this week in Colorado, where the State Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not appear on a presidential ballot.
Because I suppose they’re worried that the people might elect him – so they’re short-circuiting the people’s rights by denying the opportunity.
You all know I’m no fan of the Orange Man.
But bans are bogus. Enough with the sanctimony. Win it on the field.
In regard to the plastic ban … If you can’t convince people to pursue their own self-interest and change their behavior – you deserve whatever the outcome. Because change requires real on-the-ground effort. Not just blowhard declarations of moral superiority from a Council dais.
I’ve quoted Floyd Allred in these pages before. Floyd was the taciturn father of my childhood best friend. And Floyd, according to his lovely wife Carola, would say in the middle of their rare disagreements, “Lower your voice, and strengthen your argument.”
As Carola told me years later, “Oooooh, that would make me so mad.”
But, she grudgingly admitted, he had a point.
And from Milender’s desk …
“In prior research we’ve done quite a bit of review of the academic literature on the relationship between short-term rentals and the housing market,” said BAU Urban Economics principal, Aaron Nousaine, at the inaugural meeting of the STR (Short Term Rental) Advisory Committee, earlier last month. “And there’s a relatively strong consensus that that relationship does exist, and it generally coincides with lived experience … ”
Nousaine—who has been retained by the Town and Mono County, at large, to research the relationship between short term rentals and both the availability and pricing of long-term housing—has previously conducted similar research in North Lake Tahoe and Mariposa County.
Mariposa County, located in the western foothills of the Eastern Sierra and claiming a sizable portion of Yosemite National Park at its eastern edge, bears a striking resemblance to Mono County. Both are what Nousaine refers to as “destination economies.”
And Nousaine has already produced a report for Mariposa, titled “Housing and STRs in Mariposa County: A Careful Evaluation of the Impacts of Short Term Rentals.”
In October of 2022, Mariposa County’s Board of Supervisors directed staff to draft an ordinance instating a moratorium on new vacation rental certificates. The intention behind the ordinance was to allow the county some breathing room to study the impact of rentals on housing stock.
Discussion of the ordinance was subsequently withdrawn from the Board’s agenda, and the moratorium was shelved.
In September of this year, the County produced the aforementioned report.
It’s an 84 page document. Here’s what you need to know:
The study distills insights from extensive county housing documents, spanning over 20 years, to uncover the evolving narrative of Mariposa County’s housing challenges.
The statistical models cited in the report reveal measurable impacts from STR growth, yet they underscore a level of triviality of these effects when compared to broader economic conditions—population growth, changes in the county’s employment trends, etc. Notably, the study emphasizes that the primary driver of the housing shortage in Mariposa County is the loss of housing due to aging disrepair of the existing housing stock and the impact of what were then recent wildfires. While acknowledging certain potential negative impacts of the presence and proliferation of STRs, the study notes that these are hard to gauge, definitively.
“Lacking… quantitative measures,” reads the study, “any proposed legislation intending to mitigate possible STR nuisances would be based solely on conjecture – and thus likely to fail in that mitigation.”
The key causes identified by the study as contributing to the county’s chronic housing shortage include—other than an aging housing stock—a lack of higher density units, insufficient new construction, high seasonal vacancy, and the impact of the tourism industry as it relates to price gouging.
However, the Lewis Associates study (data from a previous study whichb Nousaine drew from) did point out a logical fallacy common to discussions surrounding short term rentals—the “assumption that every single vacation rental would otherwise be available for long term rental use [ignores] the reality that roughly 50% of all vacant housing units … were already second homes, and therefore, not available for long-term housing.”
Further analysis presented in the study revealed that Mariposa County did not experience significant net conversion from long-term housing to short term rentals.
