I’m not quite sure why Judy Carr was letting us know how Santa Fe, New Mexico, is handling their vacation rentals because Santa Fe has one vacation rental to Kona’s 20, even though both places have about the same resident population.
Heavy traffic, yes, Kona has a traffic problem! She probably has never been to Kona and driven on the highway from the airport through town. Traffic is slow moving and heavy in both north-and-south bound directions. If anyone thinks that traffic is not heavy, they should inform the people who travel this route, sometimes at a snail’s pace. About every third or fourth car is a visitor in a rental car. Maybe in Santa Fe there are a lot of retired people that don’t mind driving slowly.
Parking, try parking at one of the many beaches. The parking lots are filled and the overflow have to park on the road, which also impedes traffic. Fifty percent of those cars are visitors in rental cars. Maybe there are no beaches in Santa Fe.
Ms. Carr and many others think that the hotel industry is behind eliminating short-term rentals. Kona hotels are filled with the overflow going to short-term rentals. If you want to cook in a vacation rental instead of staying in a hotel, there is an abundance of hundreds if not thousands of short-term rentals in the many condo complexes and timeshares. These are all excellent and needed places for visitors to stay.
As for noise, the residential areas are the problem, not short-term rentals in timeshares, condo complexes or owner-occupied ohana rooms. We live here in Hawaii where it is warm all year long so locals leave their windows open all year. When the vacation renters come to Hawaii, they are ready to party all hours of the night. They do this outside because it is warm. They jump and splash in the pool at 2 a.m. because it is warm.
Do they do this in Santa Fe? Do they even have outdoor pools in Santa Fe? They don’t do this in timeshares, condo complexes or owner-occupied ohana units because someone is there to restrict and enforce the noise. They do this in the residential area homes where the owner lives out of state, thousands of miles away. The owners are not here to quiet or enforce noise restrictions on their guests. This is strictly an investment for the owners with no thought or care about the neighborhood.
The local people are trying to sleep because they are not on vacation and they need to get up the next morning for work. Vacation renters are on vacation and here to have fun before going back to cold country. I do not know if the police keep records for domestic disturbances in the middle of the night, but they have definitely been called several times for noisy vacation rental visitors.
Living in Santa Fe is similar to living in Fargo, North Dakota, or Flint and Detroit, Michigan. It is cold and people there are snuggled up to the fireplace by 9 p.m., drinking hot cocoa and eggnog while telling ghost stories. By midnight they are in bed buried under 10 blankets to keep warm. They are not outside making noise and they do not hear noises because they are inside with their windows closed. If they do go outside and make noise it is the sound of “Brrrr” or the sound of shoveling snow.
Maybe Ms. Carr should compare the vacation rental problem in Kona more realistically by choosing New Orleans or Orlando where the vacation rental problems in residential areas are enormous and out of control, again, because it is warm and taken over by investors.
Teresa Tagon is a resident of Keauhou.