A citizens group in South Lake Tahoe is pushing for a tax on the thousands of vacation homes that sit empty in the resort community most of the year, in an effort to raise money for affordable housing.
Amelia Richmond, president and co-founder of Locals for Affordable Housing, said the group hopes to place a voter initiative on the November 2024 ballot. She said it would be modeled after Berkeley’s vacancy tax, which requires the owners of homes that sit vacant more than six months per year to pay $3,000 for the first year and $6,000 every year after.
The proposal is the latest effort to confront the community’s growing affordable housing crisis, which has caused thousands of full-time and seasonal workers to leave the Tahoe basin in search of less expensive housing and made it harder for businesses to keep their workers.
“People making some of the lower wages in our community are no longer able to afford housing,” Richmond said. “As a result, a lot of businesses, your coffee shops, your restaurants, your mom and pop businesses, aren’t able to find and retain employees. At the end of the day, we’re losing employees, we’re losing families.”
The citizens group is not alone in its concern. A Tahoe Prosperity Center survey published in March 2022, found 73% of area residents said the lack of worker housing options represented the greatest threat to quality of life, even more than traffic or wildfires.
Richmond said her group is conducting outreach and fundraising to get the measure on the ballot. It has not yet submitted the formal ballot language. If the language is approved, the group would then gather signatures in an effort to qualify it for the November 2024 ballot.
Voters in several Bay Area cities including Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco have recently passed vacancy taxes, with the goal of raising money for affordable housing or convincing the owners of empty buildings and lots to convert their properties into homes. A Sacramento City Council committee discussed a similar tax in March, though the full council has not weighed in on it.
Voters in Santa Cruz rejected a vacancy tax initiative last November, with some opponents calling it a flawed and punitive measure.
Mike Glover, president and chief executive officer of The Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce, or Tahoe Chamber, said his organization supports building more affordable housing in the region and has backed several city proposed tax increases in recent years. But in a letter to the city of South Lake Tahoe in April, Glover wrote that the Tahoe Chamber does not support a vacancy tax.
“There comes a point in time where continuing to increase the local tax burden becomes counter-productive,” Glover wrote. “From our perspective, we have reached that threshold.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the South Lake Tahoe vacancy tax say having so many vacant homes is not sustainable. They add that renting those homes to local workers, even for a few months a year, could ease the situation.
“It’s becoming a drain on the economy,” said Richmond, noting 45% of the city’s homes are empty six months or more per year, a percentage that has increased over the decades. She said vacation homeowners aren’t around to go grocery shopping and their kids are not in schools.
“If people want to keep their second homes, they don’t want to rent to locals, that’s totally fine,” she added. “It just means that we’re going to look for an annual fee to offset that economic cost of not having that housing and not having you in our community full-time.”
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