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Burlington official says local short-term rental rules fund housing, aid enforcement; chamber urges more data
Summary
Witnesses told the House Committee on General and Housing that Burlington’s 2022 short-term rental ordinance created an annual registration, requires owner-occupancy for most listings, and has directed roughly $1 million into the Burlington Housing Trust Fund; the chamber called for better statewide data and said STRs support the visitor economy.
Burlington’s short-term rental ordinance, adopted after three years of local debate and in effect in September 2022, requires hosts to register annually, meet city rental-housing standards and remit city taxes that largely fund the Burlington Housing Trust Fund, city officials told the Vermont House Committee on General and Housing on Jan. 31.
Brian Pine, the director of the City of Burlington’s Community and Economic Development Office, told the committee that the city’s annual registration distinguishes whole-unit rentals from partial-unit, enforces an owner-occupancy requirement in most cases, and collects a city surcharge in addition to state tax. “If you get a good grade, the city's not gonna come back for a long for 5 years, probably. But if you get some failures, you're gonna see someone much more often,” Pine said, describing Burlington’s inspection and enforcement approach.
Pine said the city’s monitoring and a private vendor that scans platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO produce a registry the city uses for enforcement and to respond to neighbor complaints. He reported the city’s current registry shows about 204 active short-term rental units while a private data vendor, AirDNA, reports a larger count (about 324), and he described uncertainty about the gap between those figures.
Pine told lawmakers the short-term rental tax revenue has become a substantial new source for Burlington’s housing trust: “since the enactment, September of ’22 … this is the total collected in Burlington for short term rentals, just under $2,000,000. The portion that goes to the housing trust fund is [about] $1,000,005,” and the city’s monthly average for the trust-fund portion is roughly $58,000. He said that income has more than doubled annual revenues available to the trust compared with property tax receipts alone and listed recent awards funded by the trust including Spectrum Youth Shelter, Cathedral Square, Champlain Housing Trust operating support, a duplex by Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity, and a redevelopment project converting a former campus into about 70 housing units with a mix of affordable homeownership and rental.
Austin Davis, director of government affairs at the Foley/Champlain Chamber (Hello Burlington regional marketing), told the committee that short-term rentals are part of the visitor economy and meet demand that conventional lodging sometimes cannot. “STRs are important to the visitor economy and they have a place in the visitor economy,” Davis said, and said some families and visitors use STRs for reasons such as food-allergy management, multigenerational stays and remote-work flexibility. Davis also said the chamber supports getting better data: “I do think, you know, as Julie said earlier, like getting more data, I think will help.”
Committee members pressed both witnesses on enforcement, the owner-occupancy rule and whether the city tracks changes in the number of short-term rentals before and after adoption of the ordinance. Pine said the city lacks a comprehensive baseline for units before the ordinance but has relied on the registry and platform-monitoring to identify active listings and to target code-enforcement responses when neighbors report problems. He described enforcement as handled by the Department of Permitting and Inspections, which can contact owners and conduct inspections.
Both witnesses placed the short-term rental question in a broader housing-supply context. Pine described Burlington as having about 17,000 housing units — “11,000 rental units and about 6,000 owner-occupied units” — and said local regulation allows a city-specific response where vacancy rates are very low. Davis said the underlying statewide problem is a lack of housing production and called for attention to measures that increase housing supply in addition to looking at STR rules.
No formal vote or state-level action resulted from this hearing. Committee members noted additional testimony scheduled later in the day and asked staff to provide follow-up information on data sources and tax remittance mechanisms.
