The Short Term Rental Advocacy Center exists to lobby municipalities, which place so many restrictions on homeowners who wish to capitalize on this growing trend. Demographically, people who rent vacation rentals are not the partiers who are going to ruin and blight a neighborhood. According to the 2009 PhoCus Wright’s Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change: one-third of them earn a yearly income of at least $100,000, more than 60 percent of them are college-educated, 90 percent take at least two leisure trips per year, 75 percent are online more than one hour per day, and 90 percent would rent a vacation rental again and recommend them to family and friends.

Vacation rentals allow those who live here to prosper the most because now we can live here and not have to commute from the far recesses of the county. Even single mothers can participate in this lucrative endeavor instead of getting shut out of this opportunity for a supplemental income.

Let’s give our residents a real chance at a career in Durango. You have to ask yourself what’s better for the people of Durango: doing the “Durango hustle” working three jobs to make ends meet, or supplementing income with a vacation rental while living in Durango and working on a career? I know which one I’d choose, and which one is better for the kids of Durango.

Veronica Cortes

Durango