If you think Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the Honolulu City Council last week really took care of the problems caused by Airbnb and other short-term vacation rentals in Honolulu, then your reality check is going to take a really long time.

Caldwell signed an ordinance putting new limits on illegal short-term rentals.

As the new law says, “there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 short-term rentals available at any given time on Oahu, far exceeding the number of permitted units as currently provided.”

Honolulu, not surprisingly, is more than a little late addressing the Airbnb- triggered short-term vacation rental problem.

Folks in Kailua have complained about neighbors renting beach-front bungalows to short-term renters since Mufi Hannemann played Harvard basketball. Neighbors angrily called all the mayors — from Frank Fasi, Eileen Anderson, Jeremy Harris, Hannemann, Peter Carlisle to Caldwell — for help. Kailua’s complaints turned into dust, not action.

In the last decade, short-term rental problems shape-shifted into a problem in every neighborhood across the state. In response, the neighbor islands mostly started writing up local controls 18 months ago, while Honolulu did the deer-in-the-headlights routine.

Yes, Oahu’s new law might have teeth and vows of enforcement from the city bureaucrats, but it is expected to provide a fine new income stream for scores of attorneys as the lawsuits are expected to pile up.

Former Mayor Hannemann, who didn’t solve the problem when he was in office and is now a hotel industry lobbyist, wrote last week in MidWeek that “the end result should mean all vacation rentals will have to approved and regulated and the operators will pay all relevant taxes.”

There is much to regulate. Data provided by short-term rental research company AirDNA (www.airdna.co) show that last month, 5,688 private homes were short-term rentals for at least part of the month and 853 private rooms on Oahu had at least one renter.

For those wanting relief and those wanting protection, the law, instead, opens a treasure chest of questions.

When the city starts to pick new short-term rental operators, who gets the permit? Is it first to file or is it who was operating longer? And who decides? Is that fair to those who have had an operation for decades, compared with someone who listed with Airbnb last month?

And here’s the other really big “on the other hand.”

New figures show visitor arrivals are increasing, we have more tourists, but tourist spending is dropping. Obviously we are getting budget-thinking visitors, including more and more Airbnb clients. As of today we don’t know what taxes those people are paying, you don’t know if the operations are paying either general excise or the hotel room tax that they are supposed to pay.

All these questions could already be resolved if the city had started work on this problem five years ago.

Today all you can do is wait, not count the money and hope someone still wants to stay in a nice hotel.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.