Tourist towns worry that the Legislature will harm their efforts to ease the affordable housing crisis.
A bill on Capitol Hill would bar counties, cities or towns from treating residential properties with shared or fractional ownership different from other homes — in terms of zoning and land use on such properties as well as potential sanctions against their co-owners. Among the “inherent and inalienable rights” enshrined in the state constitution, they noted, is the right “to acquire, possess and protect property.”
Cities have the power to regulate land use, Kevin Heneghan, Pacaso’s vice president of legal affairs, said, “but when they do so, they need to enforce those land use codes equally. They cannot pick and choose certain property owners to be treated differently than others. And they don’t get to decide who can and cannot own property together.”