Lake Placid is a popular tourist location, both for its Olympic legacy and its location in the central Adirondacks. The popularity of AirBnB and other short-term rental options allowing local homeowners to rent their properties is creating some challenges for the village, including complaints from some residents that unregistered hotels are being operated in residential areas. Village Mayor Craig Randall tells WAMC North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley the Town of North Elba and Lake Placid have drafted a new short-term rental law and will hold a public hearing on it Tuesday evening.“We're faced with having something in the neighborhood of 600 of our home sites that are engaged in vacation rentals. Most of those represent homes that are second homes for people who themselves come here and spend time in Lake Placid but when they're not using them utilize vacation rentals as a way to help them, I suspect, cover the cost of maintaining the property, keeping it heated, paying the taxes and insurance and all of those things that any homeowner would deal with. But certainly there's a challenge here in the community in that we don't have enough housing to take care of our workers and our young families that might otherwise stay here in Lake Placid, whose families might grow and help enhance our school population, which over the years has been declining, as it is across the Adirondacks in many of our school districts. But Lake Placid again represents a real focal point in terms of the traveling public. So it is a real challenge for Lake Placid and we're working diligently on it. We're trying to come out with a set of standards that will apply appropriate public health and safety regulations to these properties because right now their use as a vacation rental is completely unregulated. And also we're trying to find a way to soften the impact on neighborhoods that one time were all family neighborhoods and now are largely vacation rental neighborhoods at least on the weekends and on during vacation times.”
The public hearing on the Lake Placid draft Short-Term Rental law is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Conference Center. Lake Placid Residents for a Sustainable Community are urging residents to speak out in favor of regulations saying they are concerned that the growth in short-term rentals is displacing affordable and workforce housing in the village.
