This Masters Project focuses on short term rental policy, regulation, and growth in Charleston, SC. As tourism-driven growth accelerates and housing affordability declines, local governments have increasingly turned to STR regulation as a tool to manage externalities and preserve residential function. Charleston’s case is quite unique in the sense that their primary regulation, a 2017 Ordinance, seeks to spatially-control STRs on a parcel level, but lacks an overall market strategy. The central question of this investigation challenges the Charleston ordinance’s efficacy, and in a parallel sense asks whether a cap-based structure could be right for Charleston’s second generation regulation for STR. To answer this question, the study employs a quasi-experimental design based on a comparative case-study analysis and five interviews with municipal professionals.
Olivia Levine (Sat,) studied this question.