Ed Neuhaus Federal court rules Austin’s short-term rental rules unlawful – Austin Monitor Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra on Tuesday issued a ruling that overturns Austin’s short-term rental ordinance adopted in 2016. Austin adopted rules in 2016 that clearly were designed to limit the number of short-term rental properties in the city. In its attempt to limit the number of short-term rentals within the city, Ezra ruled, the city violated the Andings’ constitutional rights. According to the judgment, "the imposition of a homestead requirement for individuals who owned a Type 2 property prior to the 2016 revision of the STR ordinance is unconstitutionally retroactive." "This lawsuit certainly upends the Austin ordinance," Matt Curtis, founder of the Smart City Policy Group, told the Austin Monitor on Wednesday. The judgment, he noted, "clearly says that the distinction between different kinds of homeowners is not legal," as set out in the 2016 ordinance. " And it really encourages the city to take another bite at the local rules. Curtis also told the Monitor that, in his opinion, the ruling could reverberate in local governments across the country and force them to reconsider their own STR rules. He said a number of large cities have failed in their attempts to craft ordinances that pass constitutional muster. However, he said that Galveston, Glynn County in Georgia and North Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, "all of which have more active STR inventory at any given time than Austin," could show Austin how to rewrite its ordinance.
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