The elementary school in Stinson Beach, he noted, is "having a hard time keeping its doors open" because so few children now live there. The town's population, according to census data, plunged 38% from 2016 to 2022, to 371. In 2022, there were no children younger than 15.
According to county estimates, 27% of housing units in Stinson Beach are used as short-term rentals — many of which are in the gated neighborhood of Seadrift, a flood-prone sand spit.
The town has "become like Martha's Vineyard on the West Coast," said August Temer, co-owner of Breakers Cafe on Highway 1 in Stinson Beach. "It's not people's primary residence."
Standing behind the outdoor bar on a windy afternoon last month, Temer, a 45-year-old who grew up in Stinson Beach, said that as a business owner he likes Airbnbs and the money-spending tourists they bring in. But it's sad, he said, that none of his employees can afford to live in town and must commute — which makes it difficult to keep workers.
Mac Bonn, the general manager, said he drives 45 minutes "over the hill," traversing a winding mountain road, to his home in Fairfax.
In nearby Bolinas, artist Marlie de Swart and husband Bruce Bowser welcomed the new rules, telling the Coastal Commission in a letter that their town "is being changed from a characteristic village to a vacation rental suburb."
The county ordinance limits the number of short-term rentals in Bolinas to 54. There are now 63.
The septuagenarian couple bought their century-old house with picture windows and redwood ceilings in downtown Bolinas in 1992 for about $230,000. They were stunned when a nearby house recently sold for nearly $3 million after its owner died.
Bolinas is so famously opposed to outsiders that, for years, a vigilante band called the Bolinas Border Patrol cut down road signs on Highway 1 that pointed the way into town.
Alas, Google Maps directed tourists to Bolinas. And the Airbnbs kept them there.
During the summers, De Swart said, the town is overrun by visitors whose cars idle on narrow streets for more than an hour as they wait to park. Neighbors have been replaced by short-term guests and empty second homes.
"We used to know this as very much a vibrant neighborhood," Bowser said. "A lot if it's thinned out. A lot of people are older and have passed or moved on. We used to look out on this valley, and there were a lot of lights at night. Now, it's mostly dark."
Sitting on the couple's living room table was a copy of the Point Reyes Light newspaper. On Page 11 was a classified ad that read: "In Search of Affordable Home," placed by their friend, Tess Elliott, the newspaper's publisher.
"We are the publishers of the Point Reyes Light and the assistant fire chief at the Inverness Fire Department," the ad reads. "Please help us become permanent residents and continue to contribute to the place we love."
Elliott, 44, said she and her husband have been running such ads for years. The mother of two young children, Elliott and her family live in an Inverness house that has been "rented to us at well below market rate" for the last decade by "a generous family."
"It's very fragile," she said of life as a renter in Inverness, a town of 1,500 on the Tomales Bay with 93 registered short-term rentals. "People with kids, like us, can only take that so long. You want some stability. You want to invest in a property."
Lately, she said, "we aren't feeling very hopeful."
Frank Leahy, a software engineer, bought his house a mile northwest of the newspaper office in 2020 and got a short-term rental license just before the county, in 2022, enacted a two-year moratorium on new operating licenses.
Leahy and his wife live full time in Inverness. But they travel a few weeks a year and list their house, with a bocce court out front, on Airbnb for $300 to $500 a night. Leahy said the county clamped down too broadly on short-term rental owners, conflating those who rent their homes full time and others who, like him, only rent a few weeks a year.
"I can name people who live up and down the street. If those were just rentals? It would be kind of weird," he said. "I don't have a problem with people wanting to rent out their home for a short amount of time."
Leahy said short-term rentals are being scapegoated for the housing shortage in a place where it is prohibitively difficult to build.
About four years before they bought their home, he and his wife purchased an empty hillside lot nearby, planning to build a house. It took years to get all of the permits and to have the required bird, bat, geological and traffic surveys done. During that time, the cost to build rose by several hundred thousand dollars, he said. They gave up and sold the land.
On a chilly Wednesday morning last month, Dillon Beach was virtually silent — save for the plop-plop of sandals worn by a lone wetsuit-clad surfer walking home, and the tinkling of raindrops on Maggi's windows.
With its gloomy weather, bad cell service and lack of jobs, Dillon Beach, on the south end of Bodega Bay, isn't for everyone, Maggi said.
"A lot of the bugs in this place are its feature," said Maggi, 54. "There's no town. There's no main drag. ... This place has always been made of vacation homes. It's not conducive to full-time living. It's really far from everything."
If it weren't for vacationers — who fill the village with laughter and kids and wagons and dogs — the place would be dead most days, he said.
Maggi and his wife bought the house in 2020, when they and their adult children were going stir-crazy amid the pandemic. It was a financial stretch, but renting it out has helped. A gregarious Illinois native, Maggi joked that he had become a "California cliche" — a middle-aged guy with a beach house, a cool van, a border collie mix and a surfboard, even though he can't surf well.
"We're really fortunate, and I get it," he said. But he finds it "kind of shameless" for the county to use the affordable housing crisis to justify cracking down on short-term rentals. The two-year ban on new licenses, he said, did not suddenly make houses cheap.
"You had this moratorium!" he said with a laugh. "How's your affordable housing going?"
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