LOS ANGELES — City housing investigators cited sixty short-term rental listings in Hollywood during a two-week sweep last month, the largest single enforcement action in the neighborhood since the city’s home-sharing rules took effect, officials said Wednesday.
The rules, in force since 2019, limit short-term rentals to a host’s primary residence, cap the number of nights a unit may be rented without a special permit, and require every listing to carry a registration number. Investigators say most of the cited listings broke the first rule and the most consequential one: they were whole apartments, rented year-round to a rotating cast of visitors, in buildings where no host actually lived.
“These aren’t spare rooms. They’re apartments that have been pulled out of the housing market and turned into hotels one booking at a time,” said Marcus Thibodeaux, a deputy director in the housing department’s code-enforcement unit. “In a neighborhood this tight on rentals, sixty units is not a rounding error.”
The sweep concentrated on a cluster of buildings near Franklin Avenue and along the Selma Avenue corridor, where investigators cross-referenced listing photographs, guest reviews and lockbox locations against registration records. Listings without a valid number, or with a number registered to a different address, drew citations carrying fines that escalate with each day a violation continues.
Housing advocates, who have pressed the city for tougher enforcement for years, called the action overdue. “Every one of those units is a family that could be living there instead,” said Priscilla Vaught of a tenants’ coalition that has mapped Hollywood listings block by block. She noted that the neighborhood’s vacancy rate has hovered near historic lows even as whole-unit listings proliferated.
Operators cited in the sweep tell a more complicated story. One, who rents out two units in a fourplex near Cahuenga and agreed to speak only by first name, said the rules had left small owners “guessing at a moving target” while national platforms scraped their fees regardless. “I registered what I thought I was supposed to register,” said the operator, Devon. “Now I’m told the registration was for the wrong thing. Fine. But this is not the crime wave they’re describing.”
The platforms themselves were not cited; the ordinance places the burden on hosts. A department spokesman said the city has begun sharing violation data with the largest booking sites in hopes they will delist repeat offenders, an arrangement he described as “cooperative, which is to say slow.”
Thibodeaux said the department planned similar sweeps in other neighborhoods through the fall, funded in part by the fines the enforcement itself generates — a loop he acknowledged was imperfect. “We would rather collect zero dollars and have sixty legal units,” he said. “We are not going to collect zero dollars.”