Is The Airbnb Near a School, and Other Things We Don’t Ask About the Hampton Inn

*No Hampton Inns were harmed in this comparison.

Last week, the city council in Edwardsville, Illinois, approved a short-term rental near an elementary school.

It was the ninth STR in the city.

Not the ninth on that street. The ninth one in all of Edwardsville, a city of about 27,000 people. Still, the meeting briefly had the energy of someone proposing a riverboat casino with an attached meth lab.

One alderman objected because the house is near the school playground. His concern was that nobody knows who might rent it.

Well, yes.

That is generally how lodging works.

We don’t know who is at the Hampton Inn either. That’s not Bill in Room 214. That’s a stranger eating a waffle shaped like Texas in flip-flops of unknown origin.

He’s a hotel guest. We understand that hotel guests come and go. The hotel checks them in, maintains the building and deals with problems.

Put the same man in a house with a keypad and suddenly we’re three minutes from Dateline.

According to The Intelligencer, other council members pointed out that cities don’t background-check long-term renters or hotel guests either. They questioned whether the possibility of a guest doing something bad was enough to deny the property.

The rental passed 6–1. There hadn’t been any public opposition, which helped sway at least one council member who had concerns.

So this isn’t really about Edwardsville getting it wrong. They ultimately got it right.

It’s about how fast an STR conversation can wander away from the problem at hand and into a Lifetime movie nobody has actually filmed.

We get weird when the tourists have a driveway

Hotels give us some emotional distance from visitors.

We know they’re in there, but they’ve been safely placed inside a large taupe building near a Chili’s. They become “occupancy.”

We don’t see them unloading the cooler. We don’t know how much Barefoot Moscato they brought. We don’t watch their children abandon a scooter in the driveway and start licking a decorative rock.

Short-term rentals remove the taupe building.

Now the tourists are right there, across from Linda’s hydrangeas, wearing matching cowboy hats and carrying a balloon arch into the house.

And sometimes they really are a problem.

Some STRs create chronic noise, illegal parking, overflowing trash and neighborhood disruption. Some operators buy a three-bedroom home, add 19 bunk beds and begin advertising it as perfect for youth rugby teams and light cult activity.

Regulate that.

Some destinations have real housing pressure. Some have neighborhoods where commercial rentals are overtaking residential life. Some investors behave as though purchasing a home included diplomatic immunity.

Deal with that too.

But those are different problems. Noise is not housing. Parking is not crime. Investor ownership is not a fire-code violation. And “there could be a stranger near the playground” is not much of anything.

There are strangers at Target. There are strangers driving Uber. Your cousin’s new boyfriend has been to Christmas twice, and nobody has verified him either.

We cannot create a land-use category called “people we don’t personally recognize.”

I DO think STRs should have standards

This is usually the point where somebody assumes I’m arguing that hotels have guests, houses have guests, let freedom ring.

I’m not.

I believe destinations should have real standards for short-term rentals.

The house should be safe. The property should be inspected. The operator should be identifiable. Taxes should be paid. Occupancy should make sense. Someone local should answer the phone before the neighbor has time to start a Facebook group called TAKE BACK MAPLE STREET.

Guests should be verified too.

The funny thing is, the STR industry already has tools for this.

Autohost verifies guest identities and screens reservations for fraud and risk.

VillaFact inspects homes, documents what’s in them, and catches potential problems before a guest does.

NoiseAware monitors noise levels without recording conversations, so an operator can step in before a gathering becomes three angry neighbors, two patrol cars, and Linda speaking for seven uninterrupted minutes at the next council meeting.

We have the technology. This does not require a federal task force, a blockchain, or Brent from Deloitte charging $280,000 to discover smoke detectors.

What we don’t have in most destinations is a shared operating standard that pulls any of it together.

The platform has rules. The city has permit requirements. The property manager has procedures. The insurer has another list. The HOA has a binder written in the emotional tone of a hostage negotiation.

Meanwhile, the destination still can’t answer a simple question:

Which homes are professionally operated, safe, accountable and ready to participate in the visitor economy?

That’s the work.

Not pretending every host is a sweet local entrepreneur leaving blueberry muffins and handwritten farmers-market recommendations.

Not pretending every STR is a rotating safe house for people with fake names and fireworks.

Figure out which is which.

An inspected, insured, tax-compliant home with verified guests, sensible occupancy, noise management and a responsive operator should not be treated exactly like somebody who found six old photos on Zillow Tuesday night and welcomed their first paying strangers on Friday.

Standards let us tell the difference.

Now do the Hampton Inn

Imagine reviewing a hotel using the questions we ask about one house.

• Do we know everyone who might stay there?

• Could a guest drink alcohol?

• Might people arrive after dark?

• Could someone make noise?

• Will strangers come and go?

• Is the owner making money from people sleeping indoors?

Yes.

It’s a hotel.

The Hampton Inn isn’t trusted because everyone inside was raised correctly. It’s trusted because there's an operating structure around the business.

The building is inspected. The registered guest presents identification. There are safety systems and people responsible when something goes wrong. The destination understands what the place is and how it fits into the lodging economy.

STRs showed up faster than most communities could build an equivalent structure for homes. Instead of building one, we started relitigating the morality of paid lodging one residential property at a time.

A parking complaint becomes a housing debate. The housing debate becomes a crime debate. Somebody says “community character,” which is public-meeting language for “I have run out of measurable nouns.”

Three hours later, the city has an occupancy limit, a density cap, and a rule about the font size on the permit placard.

Linda goes home unconvinced. The operator goes home furious. The tourism organization reads about the whole thing tomorrow.

Another successful evening in destination management.

Regulate the thing that is happening

If the problem is noise, regulate noise.

If the problem is parking, regulate parking.

If the house is unknown, verify it, inspect it.

If guests are creating preventable risk, require verification.

If nobody can reach the operator, require a local response.

If STR concentration is actually affecting housing, identify which housing, measure the loss, and find out whether the regulation puts usable homes back into the long-term market. This is the part skipped because headlines are often the de facto source of fact.

Cities will announce that a new rule protects housing and then never return to tell us how many homes came back, what those homes cost or whether a local worker could afford one.

We’ll measure the economic impact of a cornhole tournament to the second decimal point, but housing outcomes are apparently something we feel in our hearts.

If the policy is justified with data, it should be checked with data.

And if a guest has been verified, the home inspected, the taxes paid, the noise managed, and the operator held accountable, what exactly is left in the school-playground objection?

That the visitor is sleeping behind a residential mailbox?

Tourism already knows how to manage unfamiliar people entering a place. We do it for conventions, festivals, sports tournaments, cruise passengers and bachelorette parties called Megan’s Final Fiesta, even though Megan will absolutely continue attending girls’ trips after marriage.

We manage traffic. We communicate expectations. We coordinate public safety. We tell visitors where to park, what not to touch and why flip-flops are inadequate footwear for the Grand Canyon.

Then they sleep in a house and everybody acts like we’ve discovered a new nocturnal species.

The missing piece isn’t our ability to manage visitors; it’s our refusal to include the home in the visitor system.

Set real standards. Identify the responsible operators. Hold the bad ones accountable. Then invite the good ones into destination communications, event planning, emergency lodging, group business and visitor education.

Some STRs should be shut down. Some operators should lose their permits. Some markets need density controls, and some homes never should have accepted a guest.

I’m not interested in protecting bad operators from consequences.

I’m interested in building standards strong enough that we can tell the difference.

We don’t need to regulate STRs as anxieties; we need to qualify them as lodging.

Then maybe we can stop asking questions about the Airbnb that never occurred to us at the Hampton Inn.