This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
The tension between tourists, Californians living in the state’s coastal enclaves, and the tech companies that profit from vacation rentals is coming to a boil.
The small coastal city of Pacifica has recently become the poster child for the battle between Airbnb and the unhappy locals. Officials in Pacifica recently tried to pass rules aimed at curtailing short-term vacation rentals, only to meet unexpected stiff resistance. That led to delays and watered down regulations that some sources attribute to Airbnb’s lobbying efforts.
California’s coastal zone makes up just over 1% of the state’s total land area but accounts for a significant amount of Airbnb’s reported economic impact, according to the company. Airbnb says it contributed around $13.9 billion annually to the state’s gross domestic product in 2025, nearly 17% of it — almost $2.3 billion — generated from the coastal zone.
The lucrative nature of California’s coast as a tourist destination has brought Airbnb into regular conflict with the California Coastal Commission.
The commission has ultimate say on regulatory, planning and permitting matters that affect land use and development in the 1.5 million acres of coastline designated as the coastal zone.
Established as an independent state agency in 1972, the coastal commission was created to mitigate a rush of private development that threatened public access to the shoreline and its coastal ecosystems. The body is led by 12 appointed commissioners. The governor, the Legislature’s Senate Rules Committee and the speaker of the Assembly are in charge of appointing four commissioners each.
Airbnb has lobbied the leaders of all three legislative bodies and Pacifica’s recent experience illustrates how that influence might be manifesting.
“I think the reason why this is such an important issue for Pacifica is because they are the canary in the coal mine of cities in other parts of California that have become hollowed out communities without the characters that make up the character of the city,” said Commissioner Ariel Kelly of Healdsburg.
Pacifica residents push back
Situated just south of San Francisco, Pacifica is home to roughly 37,000 people and is divided along Highway 1 by the coastal zone. Houses are nestled into nearly every inch of buildable land, surrounded by open space and next to a shoreline known for its surfing and the country’s most scenic Taco Bell. It is a quiet, foggy bedroom community.
Available listings for both permitted and unpermitted Airbnbs averaged about 148 a month in 2018 and 251 by 2025, an increase of roughly 70%, according to AirDNA, a data analytics company that tracks the short-term rental market. Over 40% of all Airbnbs in Pacifica are operated by a company, rather than an individual person.
Residents filed more than 160 complaints to the Pacifica Police Department between August 2023 and December 2025, the majority of them reporting loud parties with dozens of guests and trespassers coming onto neighboring properties. Local meetings were heated: Residents wanted stricter rules around the rentals while city officials pointed out that the city needed the taxes they generated.
Residents’ increasing complaints eventually catalyzed the city’s effort to rewrite the vacation rental rules beginning in 2022. The matter became the subject of 14 public meetings in four years.
Pacifica officials concluded that a property with no host onsite could only be rented 60 days a year, down from 365. Short-term rental owners had to be “natural persons” and not corporations.. These and other other rules would cut the number of operating rentals in half by former city manager Kevin Woodhouse’s estimates.
Pacifica is among dozens of other jurisdictions, from neighboring Half Moon Bay to Monterey County to Malibu, that have pursued similar ordinances, while Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach attempted to ban short-term rentals entirely.
While Pacifica implemented the ordinance in the non-coastal part of the city in October 2025, it had to undergo additional steps for the coastal commission to approve it for the coastal zone.
The commission was scheduled to hear the ordinance in February. A staff report recommended approving it, leading Pacificans to believe the new rules would be swiftly confirmed.
Mere minutes into the meeting, however, the vote was postponed.
“Our agency received a significant amount of correspondence after the staff report was released to the public,” said Joshua Smith, a public information officer for the commission. “Staff felt it needed additional time to research and respond to this correspondence to adequately inform commissioners on all the points and perspectives expressed.”
Then, at April’s commission meeting, it was delayed again — this time for a year.
About 206 pages of the total 209 pages of correspondence came from one attorney, Frank Angel, and his client, Pacifica Airbnb host Russell Jones.
Angel is a land use attorney in Santa Monica who has carved a name for himself as the litigator behind several landmark California short-term rental lawsuits. He’s represented vacation rental owners in lawsuits against the cities of Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Santa Ana, all of which he won. He represents a group of Monterey County residents, the Monterey County Vacation Rental Alliance. who sued the county in 2024 and the coastal commission in August contesting the county’s recent short-term rental rules. After his successes, Airbnb hired him as a lobbyist in 2025.
Airbnb paid Angel nearly $90,000 between January 1, 2025 and March of 2026 to lobby against Pacifica’s ordinance, and $75,000 to lobby against short-term rental restrictions in Monterey, according to California secretary of state records. Airbnb reported spending more than $615,000 on state lobbying between April 2025 and June 2026, a period in which its disclosures list efforts to defeat short-term rental restrictions in Monterey County and Pacifica before the coastal commission.
In August, the issue returned to the commission once more. This time, staff recommended that Pacifica eliminate the primary residency requirement and remove any cap on the number of nights an unhosted rental can operate.
Those suggested changes reflected significant components of the requests Angel and Jones made to the commission in February. At the August meeting, commission spokesperson Smith said staff did not feel the changes were substantial.
Pacificans, and some commissioners, wholly disagreed.
Smith would not agree to speak to CalMatters on the record.
Caitlin Quinn has been a Pacifica resident for nearly 10 years and lives next door to a corporate owned short-term rental whose owners have faced dozens of complaints and were recently kicked off of Airbnb as a result, but remain active on VRBO. She urged commissioners to reject recommendations in the staff report.
The agency’s reversal reeked of corporate influence, Quinn said, directly undercutting its claim to being impervious from outside influence.
“You’re all thinking, feeling people, and you know what the truth is, and what the right decision is to pass this ordinance without amendment,” she told the commissioners. “I know this because I have a thing called a memory, and I remember six months ago your staff report suggested just that, and you were all poised to do it before a big tech corporation started rattling its sabers. We can be better than greed, can’t we? And we can still stand up to bullies, can’t we? I hope so.”
In the decade since short-term rentals exploded in popularity and California cities began seeing a need for ways to curb them, the commission’s decisions have broadly favored allowing restrictions on short-term rentals. While the commission has historically rejected any proposals to ban vacation rentals outright, it has almost always sided with cities — from San Diego to Pacifica’s neighbor, Half Moon Bay — that proposed capping the number of rentals and favoring rentals owners live in.
Over the past two decades, the commission’s decisions reveal this trend. The commission’s votes have also favored rules that regulate which kinds of homes can be used as rentals, seeking to preserve multifamily units, farm working housing and accessory dwelling units as long-term rentals.
Ordinances passed in the last decade almost universally include rules around parking, noise, property management, enforcement and transient occupancy taxes.
But something had shifted at the August meeting on Pacifica.
This time, commission staff appeared uncharacteristically worried. Dan Carl, the North Central Coast District Director at the commission, said the points made in the flood of correspondence were legitimate and concerning. Those points came almost entirely from Angel and his client, Jones, who argued that Pacifica’s restrictions violate the Coastal Act by restricting visitor access.
“To have (staff’s) recommendation come out in February, and then be rescinded is just unprecedented in my professional experience,” City Manager Sean Charpentier told the commissioners. “During 20-plus years in the public sector, 10 at the executive level, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The coastal commission voted, after four hours of discussion, to eliminate Pacifica’s primary residence requirement. In a separate vote, commissioners went against staff’s recommendation and agreed to cap unhosted rentals to 120 days a year, doubling the 60 days a year the city had proposed.
Jose Alvarado, Airbnb’s public policy manager said “The commission’s decision related to Pacifica is a win for every Californian who believes the coast belongs to everyone: not just those who can afford to live beside it.”
Previously, the commission has appeared unmoved by the possibility of external litigation; the agency has a well-documented pattern of aggressive enforcement even as lawsuits have piled up against it. That pattern led to the commission’s legacy as an all-powerful land-use agency that has drawn the ire of both Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump.
Regulating the ordinances is “just getting more complicated,” and as a result, “We’re getting more legal challenges,” Carl said.
Airbnb lobbying efforts
Deborah Sivas, director of the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic and an expert on environmental policy, said the commission’s willingness to water down the rules reflects something far more insidious.
“It feels like right now there’s kind of this historic convergence of folks who want to try to weaken the coastal commission and pare back the Coastal Act,” she said.
In recent years, Airbnb helped do just that, becoming one of the most influential forces working against the commission, which has historically faced lawsuits and backlash from developers.
“Airbnb has decided it’s hard to stop short-term rental ordinances at the local level because if you’ve got some city along the coast and all their residents are up in arms about short-term rentals, it’s going to be hard for Airbnb to go in there,” Sivas said. “But if (Airbnb) can go after the commission and make the commission the bad guy, then none of their ordinances will get approved because they’ll make the commission scared.”
The company is now spending more to lobby government entities across California and the country than ever. Airbnb spent $1.09 million on federal lobbying in 2025, up from $260,000 just 10 years prior, according to Open Secrets, a website that tracks data on campaign finance, lobbying and how money influences American politics.
In its $615,000 spent on lobbying in the 2025-26 legislative, Airbnb reported spending some of that money specifically to influence “Coastal Commission Appointees,” according to public lobbyist filings, although the exact amount is not clear.
Sivas said spending that much money lobbying is an effective strategy and “it’s pretty easy” to influence who gets appointed, thereby shifting policy toward regulations that serve Airbnb.
Airbnb has also directed significant campaign contributions to the leaders of the three legislative bodies that appoint coastal commissioners. Newsom has received nearly $500,000 from Airbnb and its employees towards the campaigns and committees he’s controlled, secretary of state filing show.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, a Democrat from Hollister who is in charge of appointing four of the commissioners, received $22,800 — reaching the legal maximum limit per election — from Airbnb between 2023 and 2026. Four months after she was elected, Senate President pro Tem Monique Limón, whose Rules Committee appoints four more commissioners, received $9,800 from Airbnb for her 2030 state controller campaign.
Airbnb has given more than $1.2 million to the campaigns of California state lawmakers and candidates since 2014, according to state campaign finance records. Nearly half of those donations have come since the start of 2025, as the company fought short-term rental restrictions before the coastal commission. It has given another $370,000 to ballot measure campaigns.
Alvarado acknowledged Airbnb’s increasing reach into government affairs. “To date, we’ve partnered with over 1,000 governments around the world to support common sense rules for short-term rentals.”
Airbnb influence outside Pacifica
Even California cities that thought they had successfully curbed short-term rentals are now facing substantial legal challenges. Southern California’s Hermosa Beach banned short-term rentals citywide in 2016, including in its coastal zone. In March 2026, residents represented by Angel won a lawsuit to reverse that ban, allowing Airbnbs to operate in coastal Hermosa Beach.
Airbnb also began not just backing but spearheading policy initiatives.
In 2024, Airbnb developed a “housing council”, which supports pro-affordable housing efforts and measures to loosen restrictions on building housing. The company has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to housing policy organizations like Up for Growth and YIMBY Action. YIMBY Action now supports fewer restrictions on short-term rentals, despite concerns that rentals further strain California’s housing stock.
Airbnb also funneled roughly $17.6 million into its own political committee to fund the Save Our Services campaign in the last two years. The Los Angeles-based campaign seeks to revise the city’s home-sharing ordinance, which only allows primary residences to be used as short-term rentals. Airbnb was not named as a backer on the campaign website or flyers until the Los Angeles Times published an investigation revealing the group’s ties.
More ordinance battles to come
One California senator is attempting to reduce the commission’s power to block short-term rental restrictions in coastal communities: In May, Sen. Ben Allen, a Santa Monica Democrat, introduced a Senate Bill 1318 that would require the coastal commission to approve any local government’s land-use permit amendment that restricts or bans unhosted short-term rentals, even if other visitor lodging is scarce. A community must be struggling to meet local housing needs and the commission would need to agree the restriction fairly balances housing needs with public coastal access.
For now, Pacifica has concluded it will accept the commission’s suggested modifications to be able to have an ordinance in place this year, with the deadline for commission review in October. If the city wanted to contest the commission’s recommendations, it would have to rework its ordinance through a months-long mandatory public process and have the commission review it once more, which would likely yield the same result, officials stated.
Quinn, who continues to regularly file complaints about the corporate owned short-term rental next door, said she was “greatly disappointed in seeing a governmental agency cave in the face of threatened litigation by a tech Goliath.” She worries that corporations like her neighbors will continue to “take homes out of the hands of families who want and need them.”
Pacifica may signal that pressure from Airbnb is working. As lawsuits play out in Monterey County, and other coastal communities — from Santa Barbara to Encinitas — prepare to take their ordinances to the coastal commission, Pacifica’s outcome could shape how far local restrictions can go.
Ray Jackson, a commissioner from Hermosa Beach, which has struggled to regulate short-term rentals, said. “It’s very germane. It’s relevant. It’s real, and we’re certainly going to have more of these.”
