All cities that rely on a tourism based economy should be paying at least one person, if not a team, just to focus enforcement on this particular issue.
All illegal STRs either would be paying proper taxes as STRs, or wouldn’t be STRs and instead would be long term housing, if these laws were enforced.
All tourist cities struggle with the same issue of lacking workforce housing, which means there are no real locals, which means there really is no real vitality to the area at the end of the day. Necessary services that a city needs to survive rely on a workforce that lives an hour drive away.
Taxes on STRs are often directed towards solving housing issues, which is generally helpful. Overall though, the dominance of STRs is the death knell for any desirable tourist town. The conversion of what would otherwise be normal housing into a STR might make business sense. For example many STRs in my town charge more per night than they would probably garner a month in long term rent. But its something that should be allowed only in extremely limited use cases, like people being allowed to STR their own primary residence only. I think what we are learning from STRs is that there is a finite limit on how much living space in a city can be for tourist use before the city itself can no longer function.
Unfettered it just destroys rental markets by removing otherwise available stock. The only way it ever generates more money is by squeezing stock out of the LTR market, pumping the value of land/rent in the general sense, driving up the value of what they can charge per night while real people are out in the street because there are no places cheap enough (or in existence) to rent for a month.
Towns have to stop acting like they are the CEOs whose sole job is to raise land valuations for their shareholders. If pretty much any town or city in the country had only focused on what produced higher land value since their founding, then they probably wouldnt still be around now. In fact, many of the worst decisions made in the history of American urban design were made chasing the rabbit of higher land values.
Paying people to enforce STR laws isnt just a good way to collect tax revenue, but literally a way to protect the remaining stock in the rental market. Hopefully it only becomes more important and we see a crackdown on STRs in general