Frameworks: Community Resilience and Short-Term Rentals
By Laurel Mire, ’24
My thesis focused on how members of the public participating in local policymaking processes perceive the relationship between community resilience and short-term rentals (STRs). I focused on the city of New Orleans, a classic example of a disaster-prone, resilience-rich community that has also been wrestling with whether and how to regulate STRs since 2016. This topic grew out of my love for the city, my interest in climate planning, my concern about how STRs may be eating away at communities, and my desire to articulate the thread I saw weaving through these topics. I soon found others who saw this connection between the community-level impacts of STRs and disaster preparedness—in particular, this story from the Texas Monthly newspaper that reads “Hurricanes Couldn’t Destroy Galveston’s Spirit. The Vacation Rental Boom Just Might.”
In the early 2000’s, the concept of community resilience emerged as a primary framework to facilitate preparation for extreme events. Community Resilience is an umbrella term used to depict the collective ability of a neighbourhood to deal with stressors and resume daily life following shocks. The specific stressors (e.g., long term threats like food insecurity or affordable housing) and shocks (e.g., hurricanes, floods) that communities face, and the interactions between them, are unique to each place. My thesis posited short-term rentals as a possible stressor to community resilience and looked to the people of New Orleans to see if they saw this connection too as they used the public comment process to share their perceptions of STRs and shape local regulations.
Existing scholarly literature does not converge on a single definition of community resilience or establish a clearcut relationship between community resilience and STRs. I therefore had to develop my own framework to outline the potential relationships between STRs and community resilience, which then served as a basis for analysing how public commenters spoke about this relationship. My framework grouped the many ways scholars define and operationalize community resilience by theme and matched these themes to the various impacts of STRs as presented by scholars.
With this framework, I could better appreciate the dynamic relationships between STRs and community resilience that materialized in public commentary. Below are the frames I used to analyze and code public comments to see not just if New Orleanians perceived a relationship between community resilience and STRs but how they saw this relationship manifest.
- The community resilience theme Capital, Connectivity, & Cohesion conceptualizes community resilience as the connections between residents that develop over time to form a neighbourhood fabric. This theme corresponds to the loss of neighbours and the connection, safety net, and neighbourhood identity formed between them as described by STR researchers.
- The theme Sociodemographic/Community Attributes frames community resilience as the building blocks of a community and its people, including physical resources like community services and commercial businesses as well as how people act towards each other, like if they fight exclusion and marginalization and support families and kids. The ability to improve upon one’s situationand stay in the community are also included. This theme corresponds to the ways STRs shape the kinds of people present in a neighbourhood, the types of services and businesses available, and who benefits or is excluded from these amenities.
- The theme of Disaster Preparedness/Experience captures more conventional proxies related to a community’s ability to respond to a shock, including prior experience with disasters and recovery and the perception that neighbours would help in an emergency. This theme indicates that community resilience is grounded in the collective knowledge that long-term residents carry with them about their community, which is necessarily lost as STRs come to dominate a neighbourhood.
- Shared Values describes the relative agreement and cohesion among members of a community about their identity, goals, and values. This connects to how STRs and the transient tourist populations that come with them can undermine a strong neighbourhood identity.
As I went through public comments and coded what people said with the community resilience themes above, I found that people tended to coalesce around certain arguments, presenting experiences that corresponded to the same community resilience theme. This makes sense: as people try to convey their opinion on a topic that they care about deeply in a 2-minute speech, they use similar language and align themselves with the opinions of a larger group for greater impact. In a discourse analysis (which was my primary method), these similar narratives are termed “storylines” – simplifications of complex ideas that get whittled down to commonly used arguments.
Two of the most interesting storylines I found – “We Want Neighbours” and “STRs for Community Good” – both identify a relationship between community resilience and STRs but they frame community resilience differently express different opinions about STRs. “We Want Neighbours” focuses on a speaker’s concern for their own neighbourhood, neighbours, and personal experiences with STRs. The community resilience concern that undergirds this storyline population stability, or rather the instability caused by loss of neighbours, which is tied to the loss of neighbourhood fabric and diversity. People also express concern about how loss of neighbours impacts community capacity to respond to disasters. Two powerful quotes illustrate this storyline:
- “Even if you are a responsible short term rental owner and operator, that doesn’t mean that you’re doing everything a citizen should. If you don’t live there, you’re not cleaning out the storm basins, you’re not going out there and taking care of your neighbourhood.”
- “It was a very diverse neighbourhood, a lot of elderly people, a lot of racial, a huge number of different, it was very mixed. Old people, poor people, young people, disabled people, people were sitting out on their stoops in the evening. People would say hello and people would say good evening…everything we fought for after Katrina to bring back. I don’t want to lose that now. And that’s the people.”
The “STRs for Community Good” storyline surprised me. I anticipated that people against STRs would use community resilience language in their public comment, while people who supported STRs would use other arguments, like how they benefit the economy, boost tourism, and provide retirement income. Yet the “STRs for Community Good” storyline presents a unique connection between community resilience, STRs, and disaster preparedness as speakers describe how they have used their rental to house hurricane victims and others impacted by disasters free of charge. In addition, New Orleanians have used their unbooked STRs to hold community meetings, providing physical infrastructure to support community resilience building, too.
These two storylines illustrate the dynamic, far-from-direct relationship between community resilience and STRs presented in the public comments I analysed. This finding inspires me because, in New Orleans, it appears that STRs can stress community resilience or bolster it depending on how they are used by owners and regulated by municipalities. This means we can strengthen community resilience by regulating how STRs are used rather than trying to get rid of STRs altogether–an unlikely outcome in such a tourism-based city.
These storylines also underscore the importance of reflecting on what resilience means for specific communities and residents so that policymakers can create place-based and actionable policies that address specific shocks, stressors, and opportunities to build resilience. For a city like New Orleans that constantly anticipates the next storm, using community resilience as a framework for assessing proposed regulations and policies can be a constructive way to weave disaster preparedness into its everyday functioning.
Read the full Master’s Thesis here: What’s a Neighborhood Without Any Neighbors? Perceptions of Community Resilience in the New Orleans Short-Term Rental Debate
Find Theses Honorable Mentions, Nominees, and winners from past years at the UEP Exemplary Thesis Library.