WAYZATA — For Bob and Terrisa Fisher, the Wayzata City Council’s decision to ban short-term rentals isn’t just a licensing issue. It’s a $30,000–$35,000 annual lifeline they say has allowed them to stay rooted in the community they’ve called home for over half a century.
Editor’s Note: The video above features a 30-minute conversation with Bob and Terrisa Fisher, offering readers a chance to hear their stories in their own words.
Bob, 77, is known around town as “Shoe Bob,” the cobbler who mended soles for decades before selling his shop. His career began in the 1970s when he worked for the Engel family at The Foursome, eventually taking over their shoe repair department. When the Engels offered to sell him the business, he struck out on his own, opening Bob’s Shoe Repair in the old Wayzata Bay Center. For decades he fixed boots, heels, and handbags for neighbors, earning a reputation as both craftsman and community fixture.
In 1976, Bob moved into his house in Wayzata’s Frog Hollow, where he and Terrisa still live today. When a longtime renter moved out in 2018, just months before the Super Bowl, they transformed their lower-level walkout into a short-term rental. They invested nearly $80,000 to gut and remodel the 700-square-foot space, quickly earning “Superhost” status on Airbnb. Guests have included former Wayzata residents returning to visit aging parents, as well as snowbirds escaping Arizona’s heat. Reviews consistently praised their hospitality.
“We’ve always been responsible hosts,” Terrisa said. “Our guests have never created a problem.”
A household budget under strain
In recent years, Bob has faced a string of health challenges — strokes, a carotid stent, surgery for infection, and an ablation for atrial fibrillation. Terrisa has managed the care, while continuing to teach and trying to reach her pension milestone.
The short-term rental has been a crucial piece of their financial puzzle. “We’ve been using that money to pay off the mortgage and hoping that we could eventually have that money as profit instead of just putting it right back toward our loan,” Terrisa explained.
The rental now brings in about $35,000 a year — income that goes directly to cover their $2,400 monthly mortgage and escrow payment, along with steadily climbing property taxes.
“For people in this area, $30,000 is a drop in the bucket, but it’s not a drop in the bucket to us,” she said. “Life will just be harder — and it’s already hard. I live paycheck to paycheck. It will make a daily, monthly impact on my choices.”
Fighting with limited strength
Terrisa said she only had the energy to attend one council meeting this spring while Bob was in a care facility. Mayor Andy Mullin called to warn her the vote didn’t look good. “He was advocating and trying to get the City Council to have some leeway,” she said. “But they looked hard pressed from the beginning just to totally ban short-term rentals. And no one else ever reached out.”
That silence, combined with the sense that minds were already made up, deepened her feeling of being left out of the conversation.
East Neighborhood realities
The Fishers’ East Neighborhood home sits on a cut-through route for drivers heading downtown. Delivery trucks, tour buses, and heavy construction vehicles rumble past daily, along with commuters racing the stoplight at the top of the hill — people not from the neighborhood cutting through. “It’s just constant,” Bob said. “When we redesigned this level, we put our bedroom on the back of the house, because it’s nonstop.”
Despite those challenges, Bob says he has never complained. “I never said anything, you know. Somebody building in their backyard or community or whatever — I just thought, well, that’s cool,” he said.
That’s why the short-term rental debate feels so different. As yard signs declaring “neighborhoods are for neighbors” appeared, Terrisa felt stung. “I’ve been a neighbor for longer than the people with those signs up,” she said. “They didn’t come to me like a neighbor. They put up a sign. Should I put up a sign in my yard to talk back to them and say, hey, neighborhoods are also for property rights?”
Bob was more blunt: “It hasn’t changed my love for this community. This can’t possibly, no matter how many a**holes get in the way, people that aren’t involved with the community really, you know, I just, I love Wayzata…”.
A life of giving, rooted in Wayzata
The sting is sharper, the Fishers say, because of how much they’ve tried to give back. In the mid-1990s, Bob pitched a tent in his yard to raise money for Thanksgiving meals for families in need. That modest idea grew into the “Sleep Out” campaign with Interfaith Outreach & Community Partners, a tradition that has drawn churches, businesses, schools, and executives into action each November.
“I think it’s pretty close to $50 million,” Bob said of the money raised over nearly three decades.
IOCP’s records show the Sleep Out had raised more than $27 million by 2018, with annual goals of $2–3 million in recent years — meaning the verified total is somewhat lower than Bob’s recollection. But the scale is undeniable: tens of millions of dollars funneled into housing, food, child care, and transportation, and thousands of families kept in stable housing because of a movement he started with one tent in his front yard.
Now, the man who once led a campaign to keep other families in their homes faces the possibility of struggling to keep his own.
Ripple effects
The ban doesn’t just touch their household. The cleaner who services their rental will lose work as well. “It’s like she loses her job too,” Terrisa noted.
For the Fishers, their home has long symbolized permanence. “You’re taking away our house,” Terrisa said quietly. “Bob calls this his toe tag house, but it’s going to be difficult to make that dream happen if it’s hard thing after hard thing like this.”
What’s next
If the ban stands, the Fishers say they will comply. But they expect it to leave a monthly gap in their budget at precisely the time when Bob’s care demands more of Terrisa’s energy.
“We’re going to be impacted by this,” she said. “I’m on the side of, let’s find a reasonable response to the problems. The problems can be addressed. Wiping the whole thing out is not.”
For Bob Fisher, that irony runs deep. The man who once helped raise millions to keep other families in their homes now wonders if he will be able to keep his own.
