Tahoe is cracking down on Airbnbs. But officials can't stop visitors from coming.
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During the first stay-at-home order, in March, South Lake Tahoe was empty. Mayor Tamara Wallace remembers driving down the four-lane highway that transects the city, toward the California-Nevada stateline, and not seeing another car on the road for almost 2 miles.
“It was a feeling of the end of the world,” Wallace says.
Mayor Wallace doesn’t think Tahoe's second stay-at-home order will roll out the same way. This time, the order coincides with one of Tahoe’s busiest times of the year for tourism.
“We’re not like Hawaii,” she says. “We can’t stop traffic to South Lake Tahoe. We are not an island. Whether or not we can stop people from coming to South Lake Tahoe is just not an issue. We can’t. But when people are here, we can have people be good stewards of our community and be kind and safe.”