Post-Eastwood Carmel Makes It a Little Harder on Tourists

SAN FRANCISCO —  Quaint little Carmel-by-the-Sea just has not been the same happy tourist center since Clint Eastwood quit public service last April to return to film making.

Eastwood, after all, was the one who made the seaside art colony safe for tourists by sweeping the city code clean of ordinances that, for example, forbade Frisbees in public parks and outlawed take-away ice cream cones.

Tourism again became a hot issue Wednesday after the City Council unanimously banned short-term housing rentals. After Jan. 5, people interested in enjoying Carmel’s ritzy shops, woodsy atmosphere and sandy beach will have to stay more than 30 days, stay in a hotel--or stay away.

Realtors and people with summer homes and retirement cottages are outraged. They said the ban, which is reminiscent of a 1981 city law that was overturned by the courts as unconstitutional, infringes on their property rights. They promised that if the city tries to enforce the new ban, adopted at a council meeting Tuesday night, they will sue.

“That’s Carmel for you,” said Anthony Lombardo, a Salinas lawyer who has been retained by several Carmel rental brokers and property owners opposed to the ban. “It’s funded by tourists, but many residents have an aversion to tourists, and so they try to kill the golden goose.”

City officials are puzzled by the controversy. They insist they are merely attempting to preserve the integrity of Carmel’s zoning laws and defend the quiet, rustic nature of its residential neighborhoods. The city has not, they insist, resumed the time-honored Carmel sport of tourist-bashing.

‘Doesn’t Want to Allow That’

“Some people who do not live here all the time may want to rent out their homes while they’re away” to help meet the mortgage payments, City Atty. Don Freeman conceded, “but the problem is, Carmel doesn’t want to allow that.”

Evidently, some full-time Carmel residents are upset by all the strangers--also known as tourists--wandering the city’s pretty, tree-shaded residential neighborhoods. The situation became intolerable, Freeman said, when some local motels bought private homes expressly to offer them as short-term rentals.

Chronic comings and goings by strangers are no small matter in a city that treasures privacy enough to formally outlaw addresses. (Carmel houses have no street numbers, and all mail must be picked up at the post office.)

Freeman said people who rent homes for a weekend or a week worry residents who do not recognize them, are less respectful of privacy and property rights and undermine such crime-prevention programs as Neighborhood Watch.

“What do they want? A police state?” teased Lombardo, who argued the suit against the 1981 ordinance. That law, he said, was overturned for unconstitutionally infringing on property rights and on homeowners’ rights to privacy and to meet and associate with whomever they pleased.

Freeman, his municipal opponent, said the new law will pass constitutional muster because it is strictly based on land-use principles and does not have the legion of exemptions that helped trip up the earlier ordinance.

“It’s quite simple,” he said. “Short-term rentals, those of less than 30 days, are a commercial use (of property)--and commercial uses are not allowed in a residential zone.”