The Brown County Area Plan Commission is looking into the role that tourist homes play in the local housing market and whether or not they should be limited in some way.

Continued discussion is on the agenda for the next APC meeting on Tuesday night, Aug. 28.

At last month’s meeting, APC member Jane Gore brought up concerns that tourist homes might be having a negative effect on housing availability for residents.

“We’re changing the size of building lots, and part of the reason for that is that we don’t have enough homes for people to live in. And I think one of the reasons is we have over 300 approved tourist homes, and who knows how many unapproved,” she said, mentioning rentals available through websites like Airbnb.

Gore is a former real estate agent. “We’re short on houses,” she said. “… In my opinion, we need to do something to reduce the amount of residential homes being converted to businesses, because that’s really what this is doing.”

The number of approved tourist homes in Brown County is around 280. Not all of them are in active use, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann.

Tourist homes need what’s called a “special exception” to operate. Those can be granted or denied by the Brown County Board of Zoning Appeals.

Gore estimated that the BZA reviews about one to four requests for new tourist homes each month. “Add that up, before year’s time, we’re going to have another hundred … if we keep that up,” she said.

Several people spoke in favor of looking into tourist home limits. Some suggestions were to increase the “buffer zone” distance between homes; alter the permitting process in some way; or only allow a certain number of tourist home slots, so if someone wanted to add one, they’d have to wait for a slot to open up.

County resident Susanne Gaudin said she and her husband have rented out a “cottage” on their property for several years to a teacher and now to a police officer. Both of them had trouble finding affordable places to live in Brown County.

“These are quality people that you want in our community, and you want them to live here; and yet we have found a way to remove just about all quality rentals from the community because we’ve turned them into tourist homes. So, please think about that,” she told the APC, calling workforce housing “a crisis situation.”

Gore and APC member Carol Bowden added other examples of professional people and families having to move out of Brown County, or not being able to move into Brown County and the school system because they couldn’t find housing.

Gore also had concerns that having a high number of tourist homes drives up the cost of housing in general. Though tourist homes themselves might not be “affordable” homes for Brown County’s workforce, they still have an effect on the market, she said. “In the real estate world, it increases the cost of living. Rentals are more expensive because of that, because of supply — supply and demand,” she said.

County commissioner Diana Biddle also supported a review of tourist home guidelines. She’s also a former real estate agent. She tied Brown County’s population decline starting in 1990 to the reduced availability of long-term rental housing. “From a county economic standpoint, the plan commission really needs to consider Jane’s concerns,” she said.

“We need to do something to start limiting who we award tourist rentals to, because it is affecting our population, our tax base,” she said.

The reason that tourist home guidelines were written in the mid-’90s, when the Little Nashville Opry was still operating, was because there was a lack of hotel rooms, Biddle said.

Many tourist rentals are second homes for people who live elsewhere, not in Brown County, Biddle and Gore said. They don’t get homestead credits for those properties, so their property taxes are higher, but Biddle didn’t believe that would offset the income tax revenue the county would be getting if the owners lived here, or the wheel taxes they would pay.

APC member Deborah Bartes pointed out that tourist homes do provide jobs for local people, in maintenance, cleaning and managing those properties.

She also wanted to see statistics that show the actual impact of tourist homes on the county, “to make sure we’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Before the August meeting, the APC planned to pull up a map showing where all the tourist homes are and check the distances between them. That could give them an idea of how many more the county could have under the current distance restrictions.

Several APC members said that if any changes were made, the APC should “grandfather” in all existing tourist homes.

“We don’t want to discourage the ones that are here and operating,” Bowden said. “What we don’t want to do is pack a whole bunch in one area that is preventing any other use of that property, such as rentals.”

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Tourist home guidelines are on the agenda of the next Area Plan Commission meeting, which starts at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 28 at the County Office Building on Gould Street.

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