I recently took a job in the Zoning division of the City of Charleston. I love it almost always, don’t get me wrong, but everybody knows zoning is the bastard stepchild of planning, a tool of nimbys hell-bent on living in their pasts, a set of iron-clad regulations as stout in the path of big developers as John Bell Hood was against General Sherman. Still, it’s a planning job, and I figure before I do something rash like take the LSAT, I’ve at least got to try to work in the field I studied and loved for four years.
I’m still learning the job, yes. I won’t ever be finished learning. My boss is still learning it and she just got a pin from the Mayor for 25 years of service. Each day is a different adventure, sometimes in the field, sometimes in the office. Each day, though, I answer questions.
Sometimes it’s a farmer, seeking a location to put her artisan hogs on a table. When I declined her porcine bribe by noting my religion, she told me that they had goats and cows on the farm too.
Sometimes it’s a realtor, trying to figure out whether the mother-in-law suite on the property, now vacant for a decent enough period, can now be rented out.
Sometimes it’s a neighbor, living down the block, whose marsh views will soon be obstructed, wanting now to learn the details of our ordinances on protection of Grand Trees. There is no lawyer in America who could go up against an older suburban couple with a strong knowledge of both the tree protection ordinance and the fact that eliminating marshside views and access will eliminate half of the value of their property. The fact that that value came from land to be developed anyway never factors in once the marsh has captured the imagination.
Sometimes it’s just a homeowner who wants a porch and can’t figure out how to get one.
Sometimes it’s a guy whose wife grew up in Charleston, who wants to know whether her house still exists, and because the receptionist knows I’m a softie, I’ll talk to him for a while about the kind of surprise he was planning for her, and where they can walk together to see houses that were like the one she was born and raised in, which was lost to the wrecking ball when the expressway came through in the mid-60’s.
Sometimes it’s a guy loitering on the corner who’s lived in the city his whole life and never heard of the Board of Architectural Review, but now that lots of buildings in his neighborhood are getting torn down, and his old friends have to move to Summerville or North Charleston while he still lives in his Auntie’s house, he’s interested in Planning and for a half-hour he asks in different ways about whether there’s anything he can do to keep the character of the neighborhood he knows and loves. I tell the different incarnations of this guy there maybe is, if he comes to meetings regularly and teams up with his friends and neighbors, but I think he and I both know every time that that’s a lie, that Developers have put a Carhartt glove over the Invisible Hand and commenced the work of Progress.
A lot of the calls I get at my desk are from faraway places. Construction companies in Chicago, developers’ offices in Atlanta or Houston or Charlotte, Yankees and Canadians calling about changes to their summer houses. It’s nice, usually, to have a job which is so in touch with such a variety of people.
About twice a week, I get a call from a 415 or a 510 number. There’s no need to guess what they’re calling about. I fire up the Zoning map and turn on the Short-Term Rental overlay layer, the area of the city where we allow Airbnb officially.
It’s probably mostly the nostalgia I have for California that drives the melancholy to the surface when I see those numbers on my caller ID, going months without seeing so much as a hill will do that to a person. There’s a little of the fact that I came to Charleston in part to avoid conjuring memories. Some is absolutely just the general feeling that well-meaning but mostly helpless folks have when looking at the tide of gentrification.
There are a lot of things about Airbnb that are good, don’t get me wrong. When a room is rented, it helps folks pay their own rent, stay in their house, cope with increases in property tax that would otherwise be devastating to communities. That I don’t mind. If it was legal, I’d do that myself.
As Pete Harrison recently wrote in Next City, though, the professionalization of Airbnb bothers me. “Multiply the types of trade-offs that come with Airbnb across an entire neighborhood,” he writes, “and what we are left with is Hipster Disney World — one that looks and maybe feels ‘authentic,’ but one that has stopped functioning as a neighborhood is supposed to.” As the San Franciscans and the Alamedans and if we’re being real at this point probably the Oaklanders too, or at least a lot of them, look to buy lots or old buildings down here, inside or on the edge of the Short-Term Rental overlay, or sometimes even far away from there entirely, to turn them into hotels, I’m facilitating the Disneyfication of the city.
As a white man who lived in Detroit for a couple years, I’ll never get around the fact that I’ve been an active participant in gentrification. It turns out that I could, in fact, give as good as I got in my childhood when my neighbors who weren’t lucky enough to own their homes got forced out by the inexorable march of “progress.”
I have some hope that City Council will make living in your Airbnb a requirement of future Short-Term Rental landlords, that they’ll reduce the permitted units from ten to something sensible like two or three, that they’ll allow it in a way that makes sense for neighborhoods. Hell, some folks from the Bay Area might even like it here. But until then, I’m stuck being the facilitator of absentee hoteliers from the Silicon Valley class, who’ve surely done some good (the ones from Oakland brought back Jerry Brown, who went on to save California) sometime, but whose consequences I’ve already seen writ large on the landscape. I can hope they have more mercy here, I guess, but the only thing hope gets up there is a Theranos or a Joost.
