That is why the growing short-term rental controversy in Orem matters far beyond Airbnb listings or property investors. At its core, this issue is about whether homeowners can rely on the city to enforce the zoning protections they were promised when they purchased their homes.

According to Orem’s own zoning code, transient lodging was not permitted throughout most residential neighborhoods. Areas designated for hotel-style or transient lodging uses were intended for specific zones, including PD22 and other approved commercial or mixed-use districts.

Yet despite those zoning restrictions, short-term rentals were allowed to spread into residential neighborhoods across the city for years.

Now residents are being told that because the city failed to enforce the code, or gave inconsistent guidance, these operations may need to be accommodated moving forward.

But that raises an important question:

Should homeowners and neighborhoods now lose the protections of residential zoning because the city failed to understand or enforce its own laws?

The answer should be no.

Zoning laws are not technical suggestions buried in city codebooks. They are legal promises about how communities will develop. Families often make the largest financial decision of their lives based on those rules. They choose neighborhoods believing they are protected from commercial uses that do not belong in residential areas.

Hotels, transient lodging, and rotating guest occupancy create impacts fundamentally different from long-term residential living. Increased traffic, parking congestion, noise, constant turnover, and the loss of neighborhood stability are exactly why cities separate transient lodging from residential zoning in the first place.

That separation matters.

Many Orem residents did not object because they dislike visitors or tourism. They object because they relied on the city’s zoning laws when purchasing homes in residential neighborhoods. They trusted that if transient lodging was prohibited outside designated zones like PD22, the city would enforce those restrictions consistently.

Instead, the city appears to have ignored or misunderstood its own ordinances for years. On the other hand, no short-term licenses were issued by the city. Short term rental operators should not have taken the word of a desk clerk. If there was any confusion beyond that, that is also the responsibility of business owners to do their due diligence. How can we take their word that now going forward they will be responsible business owners, when they weren’t from Day 1?

Now homeowners are effectively being told they may have to permanently accept hotel-like operations next door because city employees previously failed to apply the law correctly. That is not fairness. That is asking residents to absorb the consequences of government failure.

If city officials made mistakes, accountability should rest with the city — not with the neighborhoods that relied on the law as written.

This does not mean short-term rental owners are villains, but the burden of that confusion should not fall entirely on surrounding homeowners who purchased property under residential zoning expectations the city itself established.

At the end of the day, zoning only works if residents can trust it.

If Orem can ignore its own zoning ordinances for years and later rewrite expectations after neighborhoods have already been built around those rules, then residential protections become meaningless. Every homeowner in the city should be concerned about that precedent, regardless of where they stand on short-term rentals themselves.

The issue is bigger than Airbnb.

It is about whether Orem residents can still trust the city’s zoning laws to protect the neighborhoods they invested in.

Stephanie Hathaway is an Orem resident.