Street View: Airbnbs Bring Safety Concerns and Raise Housing Costs

Street View is a monthly column in which we’ll take a close look at development-related issues affecting different neighborhoods throughout the city.

Blu Sanders’ house in East Nashville sits on a zoning boundary: His side of the street is single-family residential zoning, meaning one house per lot. Across the street, it’s RM20 zoning, which means four houses (usually condos) per lot. When the area grew, investors bought the condos across the street and immediately turned them into short-term rental properties — a phenomenon popularized by apps like Airbnb that needs little introduction around these parts. 

When Sanders moved into his house after renting it out for five years, he didn’t expect to witness multiple shootings. But at an Airbnb across the street, which he says the host designed as a “party house,” he’s seen more than one. 

“I’ve called in shots fired multiple times,” Sanders says. “One was just an absolutely gigantic party. It looked like a concert just let out when everyone ran off screaming. And then the third time I had an officer in my yard, and he said he was looking for shells; he pointed out the window of the Airbnb that had been shot out.”

Sean Parker, Metro Council representative for East Nashville’s District 5 (where Sanders lives), says he’s seen “a few shootings” as a result of Airbnb parties. “Unfortunately, the enforcement is very difficult,” he says. “If the police show up, they focus on life-safety issues, not Airbnb code violations. They’re making sure that nobody is hurt, that nobody’s overdosed, things like that. They’re not really checking on your permit status.”

Sanders has reported the property across the street for code violations; he’s spoken to the police; he’s contacted Airbnb support multiple times. He says he hasn’t seen much action in response to his complaints — particularly from Airbnb. 

“There are no real consequences,” says Sanders. He says when he attended Metro Council meetings about short-term-rental safety issues, Airbnb didn’t send a representative. “They just don’t care,” he says. “And I know they don’t, because this keeps happening.”

According to insideairbnb.com, a site that compiles and analyzes data from Airbnb listings, Nashville currently has 7,733 short-term rentals. Investors own most of them, with the highest percentage owned by four companies with more than a hundred rentals each. Currently, Nashville accepts only owner-occupied short-term-rental permits in residentially zoned areas, but loopholes can cause problems with those too. 

Richard Espenant, another District 5 resident, has lived by a “party house” for a year. Espenant, a teacher, says the rental across the street often keeps him up until late at night. “All weekend there are parties, but also in the week — I could be awake at 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning with girls dressed with cowboy hats yelling and screaming, party buses picking them up, gigantic penis balloons.”

Espenant says the owner initially listed the property as an “adult playground.” The street is zoned residential, and the property is operated under an owner-occupied permit. But Espenant says the owner doesn’t live there, and Airbnb has done nothing about it. 

Like Sanders, Espenant has contacted the Metro Nashville Codes Department, the police and Airbnb, initially over noise and disruption issues — and later when he found out the owner was voting in Florida, financed the house with a VA loan, and had listed every bedroom in the rental as available. Enlisting help from their neighborhood association, Espenant and five others banded together to make a case that the Airbnb owner was not a resident. Like Sanders, Espenant has seen little progress from his reporting: All Airbnb requires as proof of residency, he says, is for the owner to register the property as the address for their driver’s license. Still, the parties continue. “Sometimes they are so intoxicated they are in my front yard,” he says. 

The city of Nashville has issued 1,940 short-term rental permits since January 2022. In District 5, 92.3 percent of listings are entire homes; 73.3 percent of short-term rentals come from hosts with multiple listings. Beyond safety issues, the proliferation of short-term rentals can also increase housing prices.

“The conversion of long-term housing into tourist accommodation has had a devastating effect on affordability in East Nashville,” says Parker. Because housing demand is inelastic, meaning it hardly changes as prices increase, “small fluctuations of supply can have massive impacts on pricing,” Parker says. “So pulling 5 percent of the units offline and converting them into tourist accommodation does not cause rents to go up 5 percent. … It causes rents to go up substantially.” 

While Parker says “the industry has worked to make the face of short-term rental be the neighbor with the extra bedroom or the mother-in-law suite,” this isn’t the case for most Nashville Airbnbs. Citywide, owners with more than 10 listings own the highest proportion of short-term rentals; in District 5, four investors own more than 20 properties each. 

The Metro Council has some permit regulations in place to combat the number of Airbnbs in residential areas, but in April, the state government attempted to pass legislation making owner-occupied permit requirements more lenient. “We’ve made some positive changes, but ultimately I think that for this issue to get much better we’re going to need some collaboration from the state,” Parker says. 

For Espenant, the “party house” across the street had one positive outcome: causing him to connect with his neighbors. “At least we worked together — it’s really cool. I’m happy that I don’t feel like my other neighbors don’t care about what’s going on.”

Sanders says he’s happy with how he’s seen his neighborhood grow over the past few years; he perceives it as less dangerous overall. That’s why the Airbnb violence surprised him. “It’s like a total other world across the street.”