Gayle Flynn paid $30,000 out of her own pocket for a fence around her property, not for looks, but to keep short-term rental guests from trespassing on her land. It’s the kind of expense homeowners are increasingly bearing themselves while local government debates how to respond to a growing vacation-rental problem in residential neighborhoods.
Flynn has lived in her neighborhood for 37 years. Over the last four, she’s watched neighbors move out, and Airbnbs move in — by her count, 40% of the houses on her street are now short-term rentals. “They’ve deprived us of our own homes and their own peacefulness that we bought, we bought into,” she said.
The disruption goes beyond noisy weekends. Mark Egbers, who lives about 40 minutes east of Flynn on a dead-end road, says the rental next door has become a de facto event venue, hosting weddings with DJs, catering trucks and crowds of 80 to 100 people roughly twice a month. “I’m not per se against Airbnbs. I’m against the irresponsible Airbnbs,” Egbers said. “If you keep the number of people down… if you keep it down to 8 or 10, then you don’t have these problems.”
Both homeowners say the county isn’t enforcing existing rules, leaving residents to police the problem themselves. “It falls on us as the neighbors to be the enforcers, and nobody in the county is currently enforcing anything,” Flynn said. Egbers said he’s called the sheriff’s department 30 to 40 times over noise and disturbances, only to be told deputies lack decibel meters and don’t know the applicable rules — and that code enforcement doesn’t work weekends, when most of the parties happen.
The toll has been personal as well as financial for Flynn. She said the stress has left her relying on medication to sleep, and recalled coming home from a heart procedure to find the house next door hosting a loud rental. “I have constant anxiety, sometimes fear, often fear,” she said.
Rather than enforce the codes already on the books, Manatee County Commissioners are now considering building an entirely new regulatory apparatus. At a work session earlier this month, staff presented commissioners with preliminary estimates of $1.5 million in first-year costs and 11 new government positions just to administer a short-term rental program — a proposal residents like Flynn say is overkill.
“The county commissioners are pretending that this is a very complicated issue, and that’s not true. They can follow the codes that are in existence and the guidelines that are in existence,” Flynn said.
Homeowners are asking for straightforward fixes: capping occupancy at 8 to 12 guests and limiting how briefly properties can be rented — no new bureaucracy required.
Tampa Bay 28 pressed the county for specifics, including a timeline for a draft ordinance, what the $1.5 million would actually fund, how many rentals currently operate in the county, and how the program would be paid for. The county said it’s too early to say, as staff is still “working through what a potential short-term vacation rental regulatory program would look like.” A county spokesperson said the cost and staffing figures presented to the board were only planning estimates, not a final budget, and that registration requirements, fees and funding mechanisms are all still undetermined.
Any eventual ordinance would go through a public process before the Board of County Commissioners votes on it.
For now, residents whose lives have been upended by unregulated short-term rentals are left waiting on a government process that, by its own admission, doesn’t yet have answers — while paying for fences, medication, and sleepless nights in the meantime.
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