Short-term rentals (STRs for short) are rentals of less than 30 days, such as are commonly made through sites like Airbnb and Vrbo. They're often blamed for contributing to Ann Arbor's housing shortage, with tighter regulation proposed as an affordable housing solution.
It's not a crazy idea to think that blocking short-term rentals might free up more housing for year-round residents. I don't think this it's worth it, though.
First, it just doesn't look like there are really that many. Ann Arbor has about 54,000 housing units, and probably only a few hundred of those are used as short term rentals.
Second, not all of them compete with long-term residents. There are units dedicated full-time to STRs, but there are also homeowners that rent out their guest room part of the year. In that case, the homeowner is lowering their housing costs a little without taking away space that would have been used by a permanent resident.
Finally, I'm wary of "us" versus "them" thinking. People need to visit Ann Arbor for work, for treatment at the hospital, and plenty of other reasons. And hanging out with friends at football games isn't my thing personally, but lots of people like that and I think it's fine.
I'm in favor of regulating and tracking STRs, as we already do. I suspect we could do a better job of enforcement. We should also do what we can to mitigate any nuisances for neighbors. I just don't think, as someone that cares a great deal about housing affordability, that they're actually much of a housing affordability issue.
More details if you're interested:
How many STRs are there?
Any estimates require a lot of guesswork. If you've figured anything out, I'd be interested in hearing about it! What I've found:
Ann Arbor requires registration for short-term rentals; a search of stream.a2gov.org finds about 300 issued licenses.
Searching Airbnb for STRs within Ann Arbor is actually a little tricky--it'll only let you search a square area, and Ann Arbor isn't square. I get maybe 400 STRS (closer to 300 if I ask for whole-unit only, not just a room).
On vbro, which only does whole-unit rentals, I get about 150 in Ann Arbor. It's possible my search parameters are off.
From past experience I suspect there's a large overlap; many hosts list their STRs on multiple sites.
Listings don't usually give you addresses, but if you're willing to do some digging it's usually possible to figure them out and the cross-reference with Ann Arbor's records. If you do that, you'll find out that probably half are unregistered. (I'm curious what the obstacle is to enforcement.)
If I had to guess I'd say that whole-unit STRs--the kind more likely to compete with full-time residents--number less than 500, or less than about 1% of our total housing supply.
As one-time thing, 1% isn't much. For comparison, that's a couple high-rises worth. In total, Ann Arbor has added about 500 units a year over the last 5 years from all new construction.