Conestoga Township, Pennsylvania has never had a short-term rental ordinance on its books, and the gap just became impossible to ignore. Township supervisors voted to authorize their solicitor to draft the municipality’s first-ever zoning rule for short-term rentals, according to a weekly short-term-rental regulatory briefing, after ordering two operators, Benuel Esh and Jordan Hostetter, to stop renting out their properties while that rule gets written.
The order effectively puts a pause on both operations mid-stream. Esh and Hostetter were told to cease operations pending formal rules, meaning whatever bookings or business model they’d built is now on hold until the township finishes a process that, by definition, didn’t exist before this dispute forced it into motion. That’s a familiar pattern in smaller municipalities across the country: short-term rentals show up faster than the zoning code written to handle them, and the first real ordinance often gets drafted only after a specific operator’s business becomes the test case.
Writing the rulebook after the fact
There’s an obvious tension built into this sequence. The township is stopping two named operators from renting before it has actually defined, in writing, what rules those operators supposedly violated. That’s not unusual when a local government is acting under general nuisance or land-use authority rather than a specific short-term rental code, but it does mean Esh and Hostetter are effectively frozen out under a standard that’s still being written. Whatever the solicitor eventually produces will retroactively define the rules of a game these two were already told to stop playing.
For other property owners in the township who might be considering renting out a home or a room, the message is straightforward even without a finished ordinance: the era of an informal, unregulated short-term rental market in Conestoga Township is ending. Once the solicitor’s draft comes back to the board, it will likely set the terms everyone else in the township has to operate under too, whether that means permitting requirements, occupancy caps, or restrictions on which zoning districts can host rentals at all.
A pattern showing up in townships nationwide
Conestoga’s move fits a broader trend playing out in small townships and mid-sized cities alike this year, where officials write short-term rental rules in direct response to a specific complaint or operator rather than getting ahead of the issue proactively. The tradeoff is that operators who moved first, in the absence of any rule telling them not to, end up bearing the cost of the township catching up. Esh and Hostetter now have to wait out a drafting process with no guarantee their existing operations will fit whatever framework the solicitor ultimately proposes.
What happens next depends largely on how the draft ordinance defines the basics: permitted zoning districts, licensing, inspection requirements, and occupancy limits. Townships that skip this step for years tend to move quickly once they finally start, in part because the lack of any existing framework makes the drafting process less about amending rules and more about building a rulebook from a blank page.
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