Balancing Short-Term Rentals: Community Character and Tourism
Zoning Practice — August 2026
By Alexandra Carter, AICP
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Nearly 20 years after the launch of Airbnb, cities, towns, and counties across the United States continue to grapple with how to regulate short-term rentals (STRs) and other forms of transient lodging. These debates are often framed as conflicts between housing affordability and tourism or between residents and visitors. While these tensions are real, they obscure the underlying planning issue: transient lodging is fundamentally a land use question.
In many instances, transient uses replace long-term residents with short-term occupants, altering patterns of occupancy, investment, and daily life. When these uses cluster in specific areas, they exacerbate these impacts. Neighborhoods may experience reduced housing availability, increased speculative activity, and diminished social cohesion. This leads to a key planning principle: for transient lodging uses, zoning regulations should address distribution and intensity, not just permission.
This issue of Zoning Practice presents a replicable zoning framework for short-term rentals. It begins by suggesting a new framework to debate the role of short-term rentals in local communities before highlighting lessons learned from previous regulatory experiences and detailing each component of a sound approach to zoning for short-term rentals and other transient lodging uses.
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About the Author
Alexandra Carter, AICP
Alexandra Carter, AICP is an urban planner and founder and CEO of Desire Line, a New Orleans–based planning and resilience firm. With over 16 years of experience in both the public and private sectors, she specializes in land use policy, zoning and code development, grants and disaster recovery, flood risk mitigation, and implementation-focused planning. Alex leads a multidisciplinary team advancing comprehensive plans, unified development codes, and resilience initiatives across the Gulf South, with a focus on practical, community-informed solutions. Previously, she served as Resilience Planning Program Manager for the Louisiana Watershed Initiative, supporting over $1.2 billion in flood risk mitigation investments. She also served as Planning and Zoning Director for St. John the Baptist Parish and as APA Louisiana Metro New Orleans Section Director. Alex holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of New Orleans and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Loyola University New Orleans, both earned with honors.