The city of Lawrence should regulate short-term rentals, but there should be limits on the amount of regulation.

A new report outlines options for the city to regulate Lawrence’s emerging short-term rental business. At present, Lawrence has no such regulations, but there are more than 150 short-term rentals in Lawrence listed on short-term rental sites such as Airbnb.com and VRBO.com.

The city report offers potential regulations that could include zoning restrictions, permits, inspections, as well as restrictions on when, where and how properties can serve as short-term rentals. Permit and inspection processes seem reasonable and would create a revenue stream for the city to regulate short-term rentals. Properties that weren’t managed properly or were the source of noise, litter, parking or maintenance complaints would face the threat of losing their permit.

But restrictions beyond permits and inspections might start to infringe on homeowners’ property rights. Among the restrictions that go too far are putting a cap on the number of nightly rentals in the city, limiting nightly rentals to rooms in owner-occupied homes and limiting when properties can be used for nightly rentals.

City Commissioner Matthew Herbert, who owns a property management company, has the right perspective on nightly rentals.

“I want people to understand this already exists in our community now,” Herbert said. “This policy is not inventing a new problem. Short-term rentals are here; all this does is it allows the city to finally regulate them for safety and it allows the city to finally generate revenue off of them, for tax purposes, for transient guest tax purposes.”

There are concerns that allowing short-term rentals could exacerbate the city’s affordable housing issues, because the practice theoretically decreases the supply of long-term rental housing and thus drives up rents. But given that the city is experiencing record construction of apartment units — building permits for more than 1,200 apartments were issued last year — it seems such concerns are exaggerated.

Additionally, short-term rentals require a different level of property management that not all property owners can provide. And like anything else, the market forces of supply and demand ultimately will regulate the volume and pricing of short-term rentals and long-term rentals in Lawrence.

The presence of the University of Kansas has made Lawrence the highest demand short-term rental market in Kansas. It’s an issue that’s not going away, and the city should take limited but appropriate steps to regulate properties used for such rentals.