Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, issued the following statement Wednesday in response to the Connecticut Supreme Court’s ruling in Wihbey v. Zoning Board of Appeals, which affirmed the Appellate Court’s holding that the 1994 zoning regulations allowed the property at issue to be used for short-term rental purposes, thus, allowing for an exception to 2018 zoning regulations prohibiting using single-family homes for short-term rentals of less than 30 days if the property owner can establish that before 2018, he used his property for short-term rental purposes.
“The fact is that short-term rentals hurt Connecticut communities already facing a shortage of affordable homes,” Senator Duff said. “This decision will exacerbate the problem by allowing corporations to treat homes like businesses, sidestep local regulations, and operate what amounts to mini-hotels in our residential neighborhoods. This ruling makes it clear that we need to do more than tinker with housing policy if we want to address this issue and the legislature will need to consider creative policies to prevent the erosion of our communities by corporations seeking to make a buck at our communities’ expense.”
The majority of Supreme Court justices in Wihbey held that short-term rentals of a single-family dwelling constituted a permissible use of the subject property under the 1994 Pine Orchard Association zoning regulations.
Specifically, the majority had to interpret the terms “home” and “residence” to determine if the property owner was allowed to use his property for short-term rentals under the 1994 zoning regulations, which would provide an exception to regulations adopted in 2018. The majority held that as used in the 1994 regulations, neither “residence” nor “home” had a temporal component so both terms reasonably could be interpreted to include a short-term rental, as the property becomes the renters’ residence for the time they are there.
In a dissent, a minority of justices argued that the terms “home” and “residence” must have a temporal requirement, otherwise they are no different than hotels and this has negative impacts on communities.
