After three months of delays, Chicago’s ordinance imposing stricter regulations on Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms could soon go into full effect.
Implementation of some rules within the ordinance, approved last summer, has been held up in federal court since December. On Tuesday, a judge denied a motion seeking to temporarily block the regulations.
A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said Chicago is preparing to implement the new rules.
“We are pleased with the judge’s ruling, and the city will begin taking steps to enforce all aspects of its home-sharing ordinance,” spokesman Bill McCaffrey wrote in an email.
The ordinance has proved controversial, sparking two lawsuits and leading to tweaks to some of the rules from City Hall. The legislation calls for an extra tax on home-sharing hosts and a limit on the number of units in a building that can be rented out on home-sharing sites, among other regulations.
Keep Chicago Livable, a nonprofit organization made up of homeowners who oppose the city’s regulations, filed suit Nov. 4 in U.S. District Court in Chicago, alleging that parts of the new law are unconstitutional.
The city agreed in December to hold off until February on implementing some of the rules, including one that would have required hosts to keep registration records, including names, addresses and signatures of all guests, on file for three years and make them available for inspection upon request from the city.
Since then, the court has delayed the full rollout of the ordinance multiple times.
Late last month, aldermen approved a change to the rules that would require city inspectors to have a search warrant or subpoena to access lists of guest information. They also agreed to remove a requirement that a host sign an attestation that he or she understands the ordinance. Instead, hosts must review a summary of the ordinance and acknowledge that shared-housing units are subject to those requirements.
The ordinance was originally set to go into effect in mid-December.
Keep Chicago Livable was not the only group of homeowners to take issue with the regulations. Another group sued the city in November, also asking for a temporary reprieve. That request was rendered unnecessary after the City Council’s tweak to the guest records rule and a promise from the city not to conduct inspections of hosts’ homes until it establishes guidelines.
Shorge Sato, an attorney for Keep Chicago Livable, said the fight to block the ordinance isn’t over.
“We are working on a motion directed at the court to reconsider,” he said. “(And) we intend on appealing the decision.”
There are about 6,500 Airbnb hosts in Chicago, according to the San Francisco-based company. Airbnb is not involved in either suit.
Airbnb remains committed to partnering with the city as the ordinance goes into effect, said Airbnb spokesman Ben Breit.
“We have made significant investments to engineer a groundbreaking host registration system, which we believe will be a model for other cities,” he said in an email.
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