Florida Keys Crack Down On Rentals

IF YOU CAN'T STAY a month, don't count on renting a beach house in the Keys, where such short-term vacations have been banned.

CUDJOE KEY, Fla. - The view is priceless. You can, however, rent it.

For $1,000 a week, Yvonne Richardson's home here has delighted vacationers seeking their own temporary slice of paradise.

It's a simple, two-bedroom place, nothing remarkable until you see the back yard: the Atlantic Ocean.

But now, thanks to a new law that has pitted neighbor against neighbor in the normally laid-back Florida Keys, even that fleeting experience of island living is beyond the reach of most vacationers.

The law is intended to curb the number of tourists encroaching on the Keys' vanishing tranquillity.

In most residential neighborhoods, it bans the rental of homes in most residential neighborhoods for less than 28 days, making that singular mode of relaxation, the beach house, impossible for anyone with less than a month of vacation time.

The ban has outraged the owners and managers of the estimated 8,000 rental homes in the Keys, as well as the stores, restaurants and service personnel who depend on a stream of visitors for their livelihood, if not their own mortgages.

"I don't know if we'll be able to keep it if we can't rent it out when we're not here," Richardson said sadly of the house that she and her husband use as a getaway from their home in Ohio several times a year, renting it out the rest of the time.

The ordinance affects unincorporated Monroe County, which encompasses the 120-mile chain of islands that arcs out from the mainland and is enviably situated between the sparkling blue Atlantic on one side and the emerald-tinged Gulf of Mexico on the other.

The controversy over the law, though, is particularly contentious here in the Lower Keys, roughly the farthest third of the islands from the mainland.

Except for the raucous Key West, at the literal end of the road,

the Lower Keys are where people come for peace rather than action, days of fishing rather than nights of bar-hopping.

Unlike the towns above and below them, the Lower Keys have just a few small hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, making rental homes a popular option for vacationers.

Rental agents say the law will most affect families, often from other parts of Florida, who come down with their boats, rent a house with a dock and stay for one or two weeks.

"I've never heard of a resort area discouraging people from coming for a vacation," said Barbara Strong, a transplanted New Yorker who lives on Big Pine Key.

The law, which went into effect about 1 1/2 months ago, is the latest outburst in the growing tensions between tourists and year-rounders in the Keys, as well as other resort areas.

Carmel, Calif., for example, enacted a ban on rentals of less than a month's duration about six years ago, said Jeff Britton, whose family owns a property-management company there. Other towns on the Northern California coast quickly followed suit.

"It became a domino effect," Britton said. "It's really unfair."

The irony, of course, is that in Carmel as well as the Florida Keys, many residents who support limiting rentals were renters once, vacationers who decided to stay.

But those who support the rental ban say it's time to tighten the lax laws that allowed desirable places such as the Keys to become overrun and overpopulated.

Tourists, supporters of the law say, encroach on the Keys' fragile environment, limited water supply and the vanishing quiet that brought many of them here.

"You would get multitudes of strangers in your neighborhood. The realtors would let four, five families into a single home. Nobody had any peace and quiet," said Gene Paxton, a retiree on Cudjoe Key.

"The public at large believes we owe them a place to vacation. This is not a vacation area."

Officials do not have statistics on how many of the 3 million annual visitors to the Keys stay in rental homes rather than hotels.

There are about 15,000 hotel rooms in the Keys, with the greatest concentration in the larger towns, such as Key West, Marathon and Key Largo.

Wendy Sullivan Glenn, a rental agent, said an accountant hired by those opposed to the rental limit estimated that there were about 4,100 licensed vacation rentals in Monroe County in 1996, when the study was conducted, and at least that many more unlicensed.

Three-fourths of those renters leased the houses for less than 28 days, and they paid $60 million for those houses, the study found. Sales tax on those short-term rentals totaled almost $6.3 million.

Opponents of the new law say its effects will trickle down the entire chain of people who depend on house renters: the maids hired to clean between rentals, the boats that take them diving or fishing, the bars and restaurants that feed them, the groceries that stock their cupboards.

Not all permanent residents are opposed to the renters.

"The renters are no trouble at all," said Bill Turner, a retired engineer who lives next to the Richardson home. "They're just like everyone else in the neighborhood."