How To Prepare For Short-Term Renters Next Door

My neighbour Bill just told us he is going to rent out his home on a short-term-rental site. Our neighbourhood has always been quiet and peaceful and filled with year-round, full-time residents, so this is new and sort of scary to all of us. How concerned should we be?

Signed, Bill’s Neighbour (a fictitious human)

Dear Bill’s Neighbour:

It was nice of Bill to mention that he was going to be renting the house. I note, however, that you did not say he asked if you would mind, so we have to assume he doesn’t care. Is Bill a little bit of a jerk? A “shovels his driveway but not the old lady across the street” kind of a guy? It doesn’t matter because Bill is now dead to us. You and your neighbours have to worry about yourselves.

The amount of concern you should have about the new, rotating cast of renters next door ranges from “none at all” to “Why is there a car in our pool?” To assist you and your community in dealing with this uninvited incursion by unknown vacationing-type people and other itinerants into your peaceful neighbourhood, here are the various types of short-term renters, and a colour-coded threat level and action plan for each.

Renter type: Invisible

Identified by: Nothing. You literally won’t know they’re there. They are quieter than the neighbours who own the house. This type of renter most likely represents the vast majority of short-term renters; people who just want a quiet family vacation somewhere cool in a nice house. Maybe some porch beers. Wave if you see them, which you won’t.

Threat level: Cellophane. A complete absence of threat. You don’t need to do anything unless you want to, which you won’t.

Renter type: Cool New Friends

Identified by: Musical selections—be it Lizzo, Kenny Chesney or The Carpenters—that coincidentally match yours and are played at socially appropriate hours and decibel levels. They beckon you to come over for drinks when they see you because they want to learn more about your interesting home town. You dig them. You swap emails and make plans to connect when you’re in their home town.

Threat level: Pink… for—LOVE them!!

Renter type: Gang of Inconsiderate Clods

Identified by: Large groups who you can hear talking even when inside your own house because they are always talking at the top of their lungs, though standing mere feet apart. Their cars fill your neighbour’s driveway, part of the street, and will, at some point, block you from leaving your driveway. They give you stink eye when approached about moving the cars. Their music and parties are not quite loud enough and not quite late enough to force you to call the cops, but you’re always a few seconds away from dialing those three magic numbers.

Threat level: Chartreuse. Ignore them to the extent possible. They will be gone in a week.

Renter type: Only People on the Planet

Identified by: Late night parties with music that appears to be entirely bass, screaming fights on the front yard, toddlers meandering aimlessly and unchaperoned on the street, animals of all sorts running off leash, at least three appearances by the cops. Hammering on your front door at 3 a.m. by confused/lost renters demanding to be let in or else they’ll “kick in your teeth.” These renters have zero respect for, indeed seem unaware of, the fact that they are not the only people on Earth.

Threat level: Red mist. Before you wake up in the backyard of Bill’s house with a gas can and a lighter, with no idea how you got there, have a heart to heart with him. Tell him his renters are not only destroying the fabric of the community and violating the town noise ordinances, but they are trying to saw up his wooden patio furniture for the fire pit, have dumped a bunch of green Jello powder into his pool, and are turning his garage door into a mural of some sort. Don’t feel bad about lying. It’s the least of the sins currently occurring on or near your property.

Renter type: Rave Advertised on TikTok

Identified by: Thousands and thousands of people. Unconscious or tweaking partiers everywhere, including your bathtub. (Does it matter at this point how they got there?) SWAT team response with National Guard unit on standby.

Threat level: For Sale. Move out as soon as you can. Then list with a local real-estate agent who is a good liar (redundancy alert), or find out which short-term-rental site Bill is using.

Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.

This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.

“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.

“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”

Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.

He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.

“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.

“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”

Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.

Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.

“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.

“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?

“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”

At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.

“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”

And there’s no AI option for that.