The Primary-Residence Rule: The One Line That Decides Most Cities
Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, DC — the biggest STR regimes in America all ask the same question first: do you live there?
Read ordinances from six different cities and one phrase keeps rising to the top: primary residence. The city is not asking where you own property. It is asking where you actually live — and it licenses the rental of your home, not the operation of a distributed hotel.
What "primary residence" means in practice
Definitions vary in detail and agree in spirit. San Francisco requires you to live in the unit at least 275 nights a year. Denver makes you swear it in an affidavit — and a false affidavit is the fact pattern behind its most serious enforcement. Boston builds its entire category system on owner occupancy, including the Owner-Adjacent category for a spare unit in the small building you live in. Washington, DC licenses no second homes at all.
Why cities chose this line
A primary-residence rule does three jobs at once. It keeps housing stock aimed at residents, because an investor unit can never qualify. It caps scale automatically — one person has one primary residence (Seattle allows exactly one additional unit, and licenses the operator to enforce it). And it is administrable: tax records, voter registration and utility bills prove residency in a way "I rent responsibly" never could.
The mistakes that follow
- Mailing-address residency. Receiving mail at the property is not living there; cities cross-check documents you filed for other purposes.
- The LLC shuffle. Putting the property in an LLC does not create a resident. The license follows a natural person who lives in the unit.
- Two "primary" homes. A married couple claiming one primary residence each, in two STR cities, is a fact pattern enforcement attorneys recognize on sight.
- The quiet second unit. In Seattle a third unit is unlicensable no matter how it is held; in Boston a non-adjacent investor unit is outside the definitions entirely.
The renter version of the same rule
For renters, the primary-residence question is joined by a harder one: your lease. Los Angeles demands a notarized landlord affidavit; Denver takes a landlord-permission affidavit with its license; New York registration effectively requires the tenancy to allow it. Your city's checker result treats the lease as a gate of its own — because in these cities, it is one.
Run your address through the free verdict: pick your market, answer the residency question honestly, and read the class that comes back — capped, primary-residence-only, registration, or not legal as described — with the fines printed next to it.