Hollywood's Trash Rules for Vacation Rentals, and the Fines
Section 119.33 wants a screened enclosure, side-door pickup and an extra cart over eight guests. Citations open at $250 and a third one suspends you.
Chapter 119 of the Hollywood code has a section almost nobody reads and code compliance genuinely checks. Section 119.33 asks four things of a licensed vacation rental: trash containers screened behind a six-foot fence or landscaping with an opening to roll them out, a contract with the waste provider for side-door pickup, a notice inside the unit stating where the containers live and how collection works, and, if your approved occupancy is above eight, at least one additional container. Properties on alley collection are exempt from the screening and side-door parts.
None of it is expensive. All of it is the sort of thing an out-of-state owner discovers halfway through an inspection.
Side-door service is the part everyone skips
Side-door pickup means the hauler comes onto the property and takes the container from where it is stored, so it never sits out front waiting on a guest to deal with it. The city wrote that into the rental rules deliberately, because the alternative is a rotating cast of strangers who have no idea what day your route runs.
On ordinary curbside, somebody has to move that cart out and back on a schedule tighter than owners expect. It can go out no earlier than 5 p.m. the day before service and no later than 7 a.m. on the day. It has to be back in its storage spot by 7 p.m. that same evening. Trucks start at 7 a.m. across the city and 8 a.m. in the Beach District. A cart still sitting out Wednesday afternoon is a citation, and it is also the thing a neighbor photographs and emails to code compliance.
The collection calendar never matches your checkouts
Waste Pro runs single-family and duplex collection for the city: garbage twice a week, recycling once, yard waste once, bulk once a month by zone. Your booking calendar does not care. A Saturday checkout with six bags of guest trash against a Tuesday garbage day means three days of shrimp shells and diapers in a carport in August, and the raccoons and the ibis on this side of town find it long before you do.
The thing that actually solves it is a second container plus the screened enclosure the ordinance already wants, and somebody pulling full bags off the property at the end of every turn instead of stacking them beside the cart. That is what a trash-out on the turn is for. Unglamorous, and it is the single most common root cause behind a summer smell complaint on a Hollywood listing.
Bulk waste is monthly, and it wrecks mattress week
Bulk is where owners get caught out. It runs once per month on your zone's scheduled date, capped at six cubic yards, and it must not be mixed with yard waste, which has its own weekly pickup and its own four-cubic-yard cap.
So the mattress a guest ruined in March, the snapped beach chairs, the patio set that finally rusted through — none of that goes to the curb on a random Thursday. Put it out on the wrong day and you have 24 hours to remove it or arrange a licensed hauler yourself before the city clears it and bills you the disposal cost plus a $200 administrative fee. Meanwhile an old mattress parked in front of a beach rental for three weeks is not a look that survives a guest photo.
Check your zone's bulk date before you order the replacement. We will run a bulk load out for you, and honestly, if your date falls next week you should not be paying us to do it.
Two fine schedules, and blaming the guest does not work
There are two separate ladders here and they stack on top of each other.
- Sanitation citations escalate: $75 for a first offense, $150 for a second, $250 for a third and $500 for every one after that, plus the $200 administrative fee whenever the city has to arrange removal itself.
- Vacation rental citations under Chapter 119 run $250 for a first offense and $500 for the second and subsequent ones, and a third finding of any violation inside a rolling twelve months suspends the license.
That suspension is worth reading twice. Three violations in a year is not an exotic scenario for a busy beach unit on curbside collection with nobody local watching it. And the ordinance makes the property owner, the vacation rental representative and the tenant jointly and severally liable, so the city can cite any one of the three or all three for the same thing. Whatever your guest did on Sunday night, the fine is yours to argue about on Monday.
What belongs in the house manual, and what belongs to your crew
A guest will follow exactly one instruction about garbage, so make it the right one. Ours is: bagged trash goes in the container inside the enclosure, and that is the end of your responsibility. Do not ask a family from Ottawa to learn your bulk zone.
The single page posted at the main entrance has to carry the location, days and times of trash pickup regardless — that is a Chapter 119 requirement rather than a nicety — so write it once, laminate it, and keep a photograph of it in your file for the next inspection.
Everything past the container belongs to whoever is physically on site. On our turns the enclosure gets photographed at the end of every clean, overflow leaves in the van, and anything that will not fit under the monthly cap gets flagged while it is still a scheduling problem rather than a code case. If you would rather handle this standing up than reactively, tell us where your containers live and which day your zone runs. Half of this is just knowing the date.