This Star-Bulletin article details a new effort by the City and County of Honolulu to shut down illegal vacation rentals. According to some counts, 2,000 rentals do not have the proper permits and face fines of $1,000 per day. The Honolulu city government has had difficulty collecting the fines, which now tally $200,000. (This seems to me to be a pitifully low number considering that they are claiming there are 2,000 illegal rentals.) To encourage homeowners to stop renting illegally and clear up their fines, the government has dropped them to only $50 per day charge, making it affordable to settle the record.

The article doesn't answer a lot of key questions namely: why has the Honolulu government frozen permits for vacation rentals since 1989 despite significant population growth and visitor interest? Will prices on these rentals start to increase as more are taken off the market? And what will happen to the poor vacationers who find their rental has disappeared after the owner shuts it down in response to city pressure? Is there any move afoot to lift the permit ban? Is this as "pull-up-the-ladder" as it appears or are there really legitimate reasons to shut down 2,000 rentals that, except for a handful of cranky neighborhood board complaints, haven't seemed to have had a real negative impact otherwise? The law is the law, of course, and everyone should play by the rules. However, this situation seems particularly capricious, given the huge number of illegal, off-the-books or unpermitted long-term rentals to local residents on Oahu that the authorities will not touch with a 10-foot pole because, let's face it, they don't want to remove any more rental units from the already tight market.

—Alex, 04/16/07