The Gearhart community has been under siege for over a year now, bombarded with flyers from vacation rental corporations and speculators offering financial incentives for converting homes in the single-family residential zone into illegal commercial use as short-term vacation rentals.

As a recent example, the anonymous Vancouver, Washington, entrepreneur “Joseph” flooded our mailboxes with a postcard promising “top dollar for your home” because “I need to purchase another rental property in the area.”

Last year our city council, after years of deliberation and public input, set up a defense against this onslaught against our quiet permanent and seasonal community. Passing an ordinance grandfathering existing short-term rentals (a great concession), it regulated them to both minimize their impact on our neighborhoods and gradually reduce them to a manageable number, while making more homes available for long-term rental as a solution to the countywide housing crisis.

Though that 2016 ordinance was recently validated by the state Land Use Board of Appeals, it is now threatened by a new initiative petition to repeal and replace it by allowing all homes in residential neighborhoods to be commercialized as short-term, largely unregulated vacation rentals. That action would violate the Comprehensive Plan — the city’s covenant with the community — which recognizes “the importance of the city’s residential neighborhoods and the need to protect them from the negative impacts of the transient rental of property”; likewise, the Comprehensive Plan calls for permanent “housing availability for all residents of the Gearhart area.”

It is to be fervently hoped that the repeal and replace petition fails. If it succeeds, it will mean the end of Gearhart as we know it.

Penny Sabol

Gearhart