And all of this demand-side management is going to do nothing for affordability. Housing affordability is a supply-side zoning issue and can be fixed very quickly:
- Unify/standardize zoning. The entire country of Japan only has about a dozen different zoning types. I see more than a dozen zoning types from my home office window.
- Stop going to council for spot upzoning. This should not be a council function. This should be handled by city operations.
- Upzone Grandview-Woodland and Hastings-Sunrise from RS-1 to RM-4. RM-4 is how Kitsilano is zoned. TADA! You’ve just created 50,000 housing units and solved the whole problem.
Supply is part of the problem, but the real culprit is that housing has been financialized and opened up as an investment vehicle for global capital. It doesn’t really matter if you change zoning laws if everything that gets built is to serve this kind of investment. Major cities in the US, such as LA and NYC, simultaneously have huge lots of vacant luxury housing stock and homelessness crises for precisely this reason.Vancouver has obviously taken steps to curb the worst excesses of this, but it’s still vulnerable to this form of “market failure.”
I work in Vancouver and have lots of coworkers who have recently bought homes. The more I look into it, the more I think the majority of this problem is related to extremely low interest rates. As rates went down, real estate all over Canada shot up a huge amount. Now that rates are rising, it immediately cooled.
The solution to housing being used as an investment is to build so much housing supply that this investment becomes worthless.
Why SHOULDN'T we just let the Chinese build a bunch of empty buildings? It's their money and if they want to waste it building us cheap housing on an investment that will eventually go bust, I say we let them.
The solution is scorched earth, "LOL, you thought your investment was going to go up, but instead we built such a ridiculous amount of housing that houses are now free for everyone".
This is a reply to the sibling comment rather than the parent (which I largely agree with). Politically incorrect rhetoric aside, it's clear than Vancouver's housing shortage can be easily addressed by free market mechanics.
Increased supply, even if not available on the market means that the owner or occupant will not outbid a local on a different housing unit. Multiple additional housing units will over time enter the market and reduce competition and rent increases. A more friendly zoning situation will also spur developers to bring in more housing capacity. This will stabilize or reduce rents, as has been empirically demonstrated in the past year by Seattle.
For the last 20 years Vancouver has had a building boom in which housing starts and completions have been at record highs. We're adding housing stock as fast as we can and faster than almost any municipality in North America. After 20 years, we're at record high prices, available rental properties are at record lows, and rents are at record highs. How is it that glutting supply has failed to drive prices down, correcting over-investment in our housing market?
I'm not sure why I should give the "correct free market response" any airtime at all, given that 1) it would appear to require making one of the top 5 Canadian cities into "scorched earth", meaning a wasteland of empty housing in order to drive out investment money so that... why? and 2) any one of a hundred or more demonstrable failures of free markets that have fueled the drive for regulation more than anything else over the same period.
Because having a bunch of free, empty apartments that investors paid for is wonderful! It means that they can be used and are available for all the productive things that building are, on the cheap.
If you could wave a magic wand and do the same thing for food and water wouldn't you do so?
If they fill up because they're cheap, that indicates market demand that will bring the investors back. You're not going to keep them out unless Vancouver becomes, in significant part, a ghost town.
Which has another cost: everyone here who owns their own property would see their most significant asset disappear as the value of their home plummeted along with all the investment properties.
If I could do the same for food, we'd soon live in a hellscape of rotten food.
I think this contributes, but it's not the principal problem. The core problem is supply shortage, which given the current astronomical prices has everything to do with zoning. Relax that enough and the market will solve the problem in a matter of years.
This would be a satisfying solution were it not for the fact that Vancouver's housing starts and completions graph is a giant up and to the right. Vancouver has been building supply. At this point if you're a politician in Vancouver that is promising to solve the problem in a few years you're going to get dumped. People wanted this problem solved yesterday.
Sure I mean if we're playing with lines on a graph in a theoretical space then building enough supply can exceed the demand and result in more affordable housing. That's not real life however.
In reality supply creation is constrained by real world factors such as time and labour supply and "just add more supply" is not so easy. It takes time.
On top of this Airbnb has acted as a sort of friction against supply creation, as when you create a new building, some percentage of the new units were being bought purely to be rented out 100% of the time as a hotel business and were thus never contributing to increasing the vacancy rate. This is why this new policy from the City of Vancouver is explicitly aimed at this sort of Airbnb use. When the City of Vancouver approves a new condo building, which takes years to build, they ideally want 100% of the units in that apartment building available for local renters.
>In reality supply creation is constrained by real world factors such as time and labour supply and "just add more supply" is not so easy. It takes time.
Ultimately, supply is constrained by cost. And in Vancouver, that's not an issue - if the regulation allows it, converting a single family home to a multi-unit dwelling is so ridiculously profitable that the solution to the housing crisis is to simply change zoning to allow it, and then wait. "just add more supply" really is that easy if you let the market forces work. yes, it's going to take time, but this problem has been ongoing in Vancouver for much longer now than the amount of time needed to fix it.
Vancouver has some special geographic considerations that you need to consider and within the downtown core the conversion away from single family units is AFAIK completely done[1]. Density increases in the downtown core are now being down by removing lower density apartment/condo buildings and replacing them with higher density buildings.
I am aware that the nearest city (New Westminster) is developing pretty actively, but there is a deadzone in between the two (Burnaby) that seems to have draconian NIMBY zoning laws. Generally speaking, Vancouver's housing crisis is pretty amazingly interesting and probably is more a result of the incredibly poor transit here[2] than anything else.
[1] There may be some single family units remaining in the Denman neighborhood and there are some remaining in Strathcona (near east van.) as well as lots in Kitsilano and the south shore in general, but both of these areas are generally considered outside of the downtown core.
[2] Oh yea, we have driverless trains, woo... but there are only three transit lines none of which connect to either of our major universities and poor management of the system has left the lines overcapacity.
Whenever I visit the greater Vancouver area, I’m struck by how much undeveloped land there is for a place with such insane house prices. Truly a head scratcher.
What makes you say that Burnaby is a deadzone? Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed all seem to be growing like crazy. I moved to Toronto a few years ago and I'm find myself surprised by new buildings every time I go back.
Burnaby heights has a real nice resident/commerce mix (but very poor transit and developers are forcing a lot of the commerce out). Metrotown is a good area, around the station the commerce is developed and there is plenty of density but going in any direction from it brings you through strip malls. Brentwood is weird... It is a new artificial neighborhood with plenty of Cactus Clubs and Starbucks but it doesn't have much natural commerce and there is very little in the area in terms of employment, I am afraid that neighborhood might suddenly collapse if the developers stop pouring money into it.
Lougheed is fair, I would generally consider that part of the Burquitlam span. It's awkwardly spread out with the mall itself sitting in a sea of parking lots, that doesn't tend to help build a good neighborhood but it is thriving, possibly due to being within short reach of the box stores out United/Woolridge.
Sorry, I was incorrect about Metrotown, it is a pretty nice city center but the rest of Burnaby suffers from west-coast suburb development, areas are either residential, res+light commerce or res+employers, it's hard to find a neighborhood where you can live, work and shop unless you're working in retail, and IMO a neighborhood that can't supply all three is going to fade away to pure residential in time due to NIMBYism.
Compare to a city with great transit, then you know. I used to think that Vancouver transit was great. Then I started working in Shenzhen. Shenzhen and Hong Kong are awesome at public transit, Vancouver sucks. Part of the problem is that it's difficult for public transit in Vancouver to be profitable because the population density is so low.
You're not incorrect, and I think it's always important to look higher and strive for that. However, it's also such an unhealthy and distasteful attitude to embrace. Now, I actually do say the same about the transit in the city I'm currently living in (Winnipeg, MB), but you have to consider the test case for what makes transit "suck". Let's use basic reliability as a measure for this. Can I expect a bus to be on time and get me to work? In Vancouver yes, in Winnipeg no. Can I expect constant time travel to the downtown core from a suburb? In Vancouver yes, in Winnipeg the bus might not show up. Is there better? Yes. In Zurich for example everything was impossibly on time every time, but the country's reputation is literally watches and money.
Population density does play a huge part, which forces inadequate access to skytrains and so on, but you can still catch a bus, then use the same fare to get on the seabus, then the skytrain, then more buses, and maybe bring your bike so you can get that last mile in.
I agree, and part of your message is one of my strong objections. Public transit shouldn't be measured in terms of income-cost for profitability, most commercial ventures come with externalities of some sort and public transit provides a strongly net positive externality effect, it helps to subsidize business costs (cheaper transit can be seen as a subsidy to wages), retail prices (again, paying less gas/time/whatever to purchase a good makes it cheaper and reduces amazon's advantage) and psychology (IMO wanderlust is a real human need, being stuck in pattern for too long lowers productivity)
It's a public service and one that society should be happy to invest in. Governments that balance the books on public transit with accountants alone are acting against the societal good.
Fair enough. When I said profitable, I used the wrong word for what I meant. What I meant to say was sustainable. Profitable public transit is easily sustainable. Unprofitable public transit, harder to make sustainable, requires a really serious government commitment, and there are so many other things that also seriously require government equipment. For example, if I had to choose between Vancouver having good public transit and good public health care, I'd choose good public health care. Of course in an ideal world, they'd find funding for two (and more) unprofitable public programs.
Yup, or just go to an east coast city (though apparently NYC is sort of terrible right now). I'm originally from Boston and while the city isn't perfect it has a solid offering in terms of moving through the metropolitan area efficiently, whether you reside directly on a T line or not.
Cities built before cars were as widespread as they are now had to put a lot more effort into making themselves livable and providing sane ways to move about the city locally (for daily needs) and regionally (for occasional needs)
I have, and would like to move there if I can manage it. Valid criticism to be sure, but I think it's a bit misguided to levy a statement like "Vancouver transit sucks". Because it doesn't. At the very least it's pretty good. No it's not Zurich or Schenzen, but it's also not Winnipeg, Manitoba.
You're absolutely correct. Vancouver is unlike SF in that it has no issues building new residential buildings.
At the moment housing starts in Vancouver are at all time highs, unprecedented for decades, and yet vacancy remains sub zero and housing is very unaffordable. This suggests that even these unprecedented levels of supply creation are unable to meet demand, and there are more issues at play than a lack of supply.
This is even more clear when you contrast housing supply to population growth. Population growth in Vancouver, Canada has been stable; almost linear, and relatively low. Meanwhile, housing supply has exploded across the region. Yet, housing remains unobtainable to the vast majority of residents. What is going on? It clearly is not a supply problem, and perhaps even worse, there could be a massive supply glut that for reasons I can only speculate has not become available for occupancy.
This is not necessarily indicative of anything; I don't if this applies to Vancouver, but a big portion of why DC and Manhattan have bustling residential demand despite having less population than their historical peaks is that there has been a general reduction in household size due to various factors. So you could have the same amount of people but a much higher amount of households.
Normally the news articles say its Chinese investors parking their money in Vancouver housing since it is likely to be stable compared to the yuan, etc.
Ah yes, the Chinese investor bogeyman. Apparently there are enough millionaires to cause problems in so many cities around the globe. Yet latest figures put foreign ownership at around 10% max. Let's ignore low interest rates and Canadians bidding against themselves in a hot market.
I also think the foreign investor thing is overblown, but it’s always the marginal demand that causes prices to go up. Take 10% of the property owners out of a market and prices will go down.
You can say that about any non-zero share of the market; take it out and it becomes cheaper! I believe the reason we even talk about foreign investors is that the collective mind would like to attribute the mess to "them" versus "us".
Exactly! I would guess that another driver of high prices is speculation by Canadians. Low interest rates and the "real estate always goes up" mentality has created a ton of panicked buyers who are willing to extend themselves financially in order to prevent being priced out of the market forever.
Let's also ignore that before the foreign investor tax over 20% of purchases were being made by foreign investors in places like Langley and Richmond. That is insane when you think that these people aren't selling at the same time, and is just pure demand.
Those figures are estimates. Blind trusts and proxy buyers are two ways to hide ownership.
Protest all you want, but with current available data, all the public can do is speculate, only the government has access to the data necessary to have a deeper understanding.
As long as residential units/person and square footage/person are both on the decline, you should expect housing prices to go up. AFAIK both of these metrics are still falling in all of the major West Coast cities.
We also have unprecedented immigration with no end in sight in fact, we are rapidly increasing it. As well, we are allowing more and more temporary foreign residents (students, TFWs, illegals, etc). We need drastically more supply.
This looks like a pretty good agreement for both parties. AirBnB continues to operate in Vancity, Vancity can set rules and governance to short term rentals.
The most important is that Vancity can deny the ability for commercial operators pretending to be residential operators and punish those that persist.
- Short-term rentals will only be allowed in a principal residence, where the operator resides for more than 180 days of the year and receives mail
- Commercial operators or other properties that do not qualify for the short-term rental business license program will be subject to these new fines effective April 19.
The ball is really in Vancity's court here as they can enforce (or not) as necessary.
Please don't call Vancouver Vancity repeatedly. This is not a local thing. Vancity is a credit union. In local development, politics and such the city government is usually abbreviated as CoV (City of Vancouver) to distinguish it from the other similarly named entities, all of which are separate cities:
>>The most important is that Vancity can deny the ability for commercial operators pretending to be residential operators and punish those that persist.
Watch now for a big increase in business licenses as those operators begin to do business under strawmen.
Still can't get a taxi most nights unless you call an hour ahead. In fact, you'll be able to get legal weed in this city before you can hail a ride service.
On a Saturday night at dinnertime, I get cabs within 5-10 minutes, and I'm (just) outside downtown. Between the individual cab company apps and eCab, Vancouver's taxi services have shaped up a lot. One cabbie even described in detail how their company punished drivers who don't respond reliably to booking requests through the app. Same company told me one time when I called that it would be as fast to book through the app since it all goes into the same system anyway.
I'll credit the threat of Uber with triggering this systemic change, but I never recognize complaints like yours. I get cabs reliably and reasonably quickly even on peak nights.
> I'll credit the threat of Uber with triggering this systemic change
This is a really, really important caveat in your argument. Even the threat of Uber was enough to improve cab services. Now let's actually have ride hailing competition (provided Uber is held to the same standards as taxis.)
As for cab drivers, I've heard no shortage of complaints from friends and family about cabs (be it the money, service, availability, etc.) Living just outside downtown I suspect is much better for getting cabs than living downtown, as cab drivers are heading back downtown for more pickups anyway quite often (especially on Saturday nights.)
Never mind trying to just hail a cab off the street - I've been denied a few times based on where I was going, which I'm pretty sure is illegal. There's no legitimate argument against ride hailing services like Uber so long as they're operating with the same standards, unless you're a cabbie who stands to lose work.
As always happens in these cases, I believe that whatever public authority (the municipality, the governement, etc.) making an "agreement" with a private company does three (IMHO) terrible things:
1) undervalues its own authority (ultimately the authority of citizens/people) to simply make a Law or regulation and enforce it
2) recognizes to a private company (which big as it might be is only one of the various playes in the field) a "contractual force" that the company should not have, besides giving to it a lot of brand publicity for free
3) consequently all other companies operating in the same field are (without any particular reason) underprivileged, somehow reinforcing and helping the attempts to become a monopoly of the "big one".
The rules for qualifying for a rental license are detailed, and pretty reasonable. They permit renting out a room, or your house if you live in it, but do not permit turning an apartment complex into an AirBnB hotel. In short, you can let on AirBnB, as long as you are not diminishing housing stock. [1]
> It's your principal residence, in other words, where you live most of the year and the residential address you use for bills, identification, taxes, and insurance
> It's a legal dwelling unit (a home with an address that complies with all applicable regulations, including building code and fire safety)
> You have a short-term rental business licence
> If you're renting, your landlord allows you to sublet your home as a short-term rental
> If you're in a strata, your strata bylaws support short-term rentals in your building
Short term rentals do not diminish housing stock, and help a city get more tourism which is by all means good for the whole. Its one more case of locals that vote vs non-locals that dont, even if they are way more numerous.
If Vancouver finds itself short of houses by whatever measure, they have to look elsewhere.
When I buy an apartment, and sublet it to a long-term tenant, one unit of housing exists.
When I kick that long-term tenant out, and turn it into a AirBnB hotel, I just took one unit of housing from the market for locals, and added one unit of housing to the tourist market.
> more tourism which is by all means good for the whole
This is contentious. The city may be better off as a whole if it did not have 4,000 homeless people, many of whom were priced out of their apartments, due to tourism, foreign buyers, etc.
To many people, more tourism brings little to no benefit, while a reduced housing stock brings much direct harm.
> This is contentious. The city may be better off as a whole if it did not have 4,000 homeless people, many of whom were priced out of their apartments, due to tourism, foreign buyers, etc.
Homeless people existed in SF long before Airbnb existed.
> To many people, more tourism brings little to no benefit, while a reduced housing stock brings much direct harm.
Yes, to long term renters. There is no doubt that long term renters would prefer no short term renters existed. They would also prefer for all units to be rent controlled, or that landlords and property owners gave their properties for free.
You'd be correct iff a) the dwelling is occupied near-100% of the time AND b) hotels, hostels and similarly-zoned dwellings are routinely at capacity OR c) the dwelling rented is the principal residence of the owner.
Do you have data to support this w.r.t. Vancouver?
That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.
> b) hotels, hostels and similarly-zoned dwellings are routinely at capacity
There is no need to look at such thing. In this case you are trying to look at each potential dwelling unit as an abstract unit and each resident as a unit, but they have their own differences and imperfections. Looking at such a metric will push you to think policies like moving long term residents to hotels!
> Do you have data to support this w.r.t. Vancouver?
I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb, and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
> That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.
You do want people living in their homes for the vast majority of the time. You want them living there, hopefully being part of the community, getting invested in their lives there. The original argument is very sensible.
> There is no need to look at such thing. In this case you are trying to look at each potential dwelling unit as an abstract unit and each resident as a unit, but they have their own differences and imperfections. Looking at such a metric will push you to think policies like moving long term residents to hotels!
This is only sort of okay. No reasonable person who cares about housing would push to move long term residents to hotels. This is just a terrible premise to put forward.
> I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb, and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
Do they really? Like whom? AirBnB isn't particularly expensive, and all-in costs are more often than not more expensive than hotels. I don't know _anyone_ who says they travel more because of AirBnb.
> You do want people living in their homes for the vast majority of the time. You want them living there, hopefully being part of the community, getting invested in their lives there. The original argument is very sensible.
I vehemently disagree. People should be doing what they want, not what some other random person thinks they should be doing. Cities have dead periods all the time: people leave new york in the winter, or buenos aires in the summer.
The idea that a community grows stronger by putting a fence is a sad one to me.
> This is only sort of okay. No reasonable person who cares about housing would push to move long term residents to hotels. This is just a terrible premise to put forward.
It is the equivalent premise to saying that you should ban hotels so there are more long term residents, or known as, reduce short term housing stock to increase long term housing stock.
> Do they really? Like whom? AirBnB isn't particularly expensive, and all-in costs are more often than not more expensive than hotels. I don't know _anyone_ who says they travel more because of AirBnb.
You might also not hear anyone say they use cabs more because of lyft and uber but I assure you that they do. Hotels have not particularly suffered their market share because of airbnb, but airbnb is widely used in all major cities. Hostels probably took a hit, but nowhere near the usage airbnb has. Hotels ~=, Hostels -=, Airbnb ++++= => people are travelling more.
> I vehemently disagree. People should be doing what they want, not what some other random person thinks they should be doing. Cities have dead periods all the time: people leave new york in the winter, or buenos aires in the summer. The idea that a community grows stronger by putting a fence is a sad one to me.
A society's benefit takes precedent over the desires of individuals. A society wants people living in their homes most of the time. They want the majority of housing for residents with very few, specific examples such as resort towns.
> It is the equivalent premise to saying that you should ban hotels so there are more long term residents, or known as, reduce short term housing stock to increase long term housing stock.
Again, that's not the case. Hotels are purpose built, temporary places for people to stay. AirBnB is made on the premise of converting existing long-term housing in to short-term rentals.
> You might also not hear anyone say they use cabs more because of lyft and uber but I assure you that they do. Hotels have not particularly suffered their market share because of airbnb, but airbnb is widely used in all major cities. Hostels probably took a hit, but nowhere near the usage airbnb has. Hotels ~=, Hostels -=, Airbnb ++++= => people are travelling more.
I don't have any numbers here and without doing it, I'm not going to hand wave at it anymore.
>A society's benefit takes precedent over the desires of individuals. A society wants people living in their homes most of the time. They want the majority of housing for residents with very few, specific examples such as resort towns.
Okay, then if society > individuals, definitely you should not regulate airbnb over long term residents, because short term residents are a higher portion of society. Way to shoot yourself in the foot!
> Again, that's not the case. Hotels are purpose built, temporary places for people to stay. AirBnB is made on the premise of converting existing long-term housing in to short-term rentals.
Unless you have the strange assumption that hotels take no space whatsoever, they also convert long term housing to short term housing.
> I don't have any numbers here and without doing it, I'm not going to hand wave at it anymore.
One of the biggest new companies in the world, valued at multiple tens of billions, takes a 15% cut on short term rentals, hotels stocks are doing fine and you honestly believe people are not travelling more?
I suggest you talk with people you know and ask them how many times they stayed at a hotel in their lifetime and how many times they stayed at an airbnb. The answer will surprise you.
> That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.
I think you're confused about what I'm saying here. I'm not stating that this is legislation I'd hope to have passed--I'm saying that your point (short term rentals don't decrease effective housing availability in Vancouver) can only be true if certain conditions are met--your main point here, being covered in c) 'the dwelling rented is the principal residence of the owner.' This agreement with AirBnB is a step towards acknowledging this.
Mostly, though, I think your response indicates more strongly that you're just confused about Vancouver as a city. Things that work elsewhere in the world (eg: flat expansion) don't work for Vancouver due to ocean to the west, the US border on the south, and mountains/other townships already experiencing housing pains on the north and east. Things that most other places care about (eg: AirBnB tourism) don't apply so much to Vancouver, as almost all our tourists either go to Whistler or arrives on cruise ships (and thus needs no AirBnB). The hotels and hostels have more than enough capacity to handle the rest.
It's a fact of the matter that landlords buying multiple apartments to rent out temporary AirBnBs reduces housing stock, just as it's a fact that refusing to rezone certain areas of Vancouver reduces potential house stock.
> I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb
I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
> and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
> It's a fact of the matter that landlords buying multiple apartments to rent out temporary AirBnBs reduces housing stock, just as it's a fact that refusing to rezone certain areas of Vancouver reduces potential house stock.
In a pre-hotel era, it could have been also argued that hotels reduce the housing stock. After all, if long term residents dont use them, you could build residents in that place.
It has to be made absolutely clear that favoring long term residents over short term residents is a matter of power not of economics. It is a modern attempt at a tariff, or at an import restriction.
Vancouver might not be able to expand sideways but it can expand up. But lets say for the sake of argument it is impossible to build even a single dwelling unit more. Who is to say what each unit provides as maximum value? Why do you think that long term residents are more valuable to the city than short term residents even when they pay less, and where do you draw the line between allowing airbnbs or banning hotels. Or putting tourist quotas or tariffs.
> I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
It is very much pertinent to vancouver. They have a disease that would exist with or without airbnb, which is the affordability of the housing stock. Airbnb might aggravate that like eating ice cream aggravates your indigestion. That doesnt mean the proper solution is to 'regulate' ice cream.
> In a pre-hotel era, it could have been also argued that hotels reduce the housing stock. After all, if long term residents dont use them, you could build residents in that place.
Sure, in a pre-hotel era, but then someone thought "hey what about people coming to visit our city?" and hotels were born.
> It has to be made absolutely clear that favoring long term residents over short term residents is a matter of power not of economics. It is a modern attempt at a tariff, or at an import restriction.
So? The long-term residents are the people that live in the city and actually make it what it is. They get the final say in what goes on in their own city that they pay taxes to. It's not about power--unless you mean the economic power to continue to afford to live in their city.
> Vancouver might not be able to expand sideways but it can expand up.
Sure, and I mention that as another way of alleviating housing strain--but that still doesn't absolve AirBnB renters.
> But lets say for the sake of argument it is impossible to build even a single dwelling unit more. Who is to say what each unit provides as maximum value? Why do you think that long term residents are more valuable to the city than short term residents even when they pay less, and where do you draw the line between allowing airbnbs or banning hotels. Or putting tourist quotas or tariffs.
I mean, your argument here is basically "wealthy travelers with the help of a large, wealthy corporation should be allowed to break local laws because it might be better for the economy."
> They have a disease that would exist with or without airbnb, which is the affordability of the housing stock.
Sure.
> Airbnb might aggravate that
This is a far cry from your original statement of "Short term rentals do not diminish housing stock"
> like eating ice cream aggravates your indigestion. That doesnt mean the proper solution is to 'regulate' ice cream.
So, a child eats ice cream, gets an upset tummy and demands government reconciliation therefore government regulation is silly?
A better metaphor would simply be a child eating ice cream despite being told not to by her parents, discovering that it gave her a terrible bellyache because she has lactose intolerance, and then deciding that she should regulate her ice cream intake carefully to avoid bellyaches in the future.
But I think you're just mistaken about the impetus for Vancouver to do this. I'm a fan of this regulation as I think it solves the extant problems of AirBnB (eg: people effectively operating hotels in areas without proper zoning without going through the relatively important legal hurdles to license one) while keeping the core principle in tact (ie: if you're going on vacation, it's fair to want to rent out your property for a short term occupant when you're not using it).
Post regulation: short term rentals are legal, provided that a) you acquire a license from the city to operate (note: this also protects consumers to some extant from scams), b) it's your principal dwelling, c) it's an actual legal dwelling (eg: not a hollowed out bus in an industrial park), and d) you have permission from the owner/strata.
Pre-regulation: short term rentals are illegal.
Effectively, this regulation expands the capabilities of AirBnB (good) while also limiting the effects of diminished housing in the city caused by AirBnB (good) while also providing some government-backed consumer protection (good). Literally the only people that this regulation hamstrings are property owners who own multiple residential apartments/houses that they do not live in who've been already breaking the law by allowing short-term rentals while not renting it out to long-term residents (which clearly and obviously diminishes housing stock). Sounds like a win in my books.
> Sure, in a pre-hotel era, but then someone thought "hey what about people coming to visit our city?" and hotels were born.
And someone thought what about even more of those people and airbnb was born...
> So? The long-term residents are the people that live in the city and actually make it what it is. They get the final say in what goes on in their own city that they pay taxes to. It's not about power--unless you mean the economic power to continue to afford to live in their city.
Thats your opinion. What would new york be without tourists? Or vancouver? Definitely a different city.
And they pay taxes for services they consume, not to get a privilege over stranges, that, by the way, also pay taxes. In fact, the visitors do more for the city than the actual tax paying residents. Because they bring money in, that increases the revenue of the city as well as of the individuals. If that were the bar to measure, then it would be the visitors that get to vote over the locals, since they do so much more to fill the coffers.
> I mean, your argument here is basically "wealthy travelers with the help of a large, wealthy corporation should be allowed to break local laws because it might be better for the economy."
If your main concern is companies breaking the law, then I have a proposition to satisfy you and me at the same time. Do away with the laws, and now there are no law-breakers.
> This is a far cry from your original statement of "Short term rentals do not diminish housing stock"
You are switching the definition of housing stock: they dont diminish it, they increase it. More people fit in the same space thanks to airbnb, because it extends utilization rates and adds density: it just does so at a cost to the long term resident over short term residents.
We disagree on the definition of dweller, cities require more than just vacation seekers to function. And the longer term renters aren't taking up those dwelling since it's more profitable for owners to rent out short term, but the reason that anyone wants to rent short term is because it's an interesting place to be, which it won't be if it's all people on vacation.
It's no quandary at all, the visitors and the landlords agree. Only a minority disagrees.
If the rate of visitors reaches a rate where where the occupancy rate of airbnbs is makes them less interesting than long term units, congratulations, you have found market equilibrium.
So people who simply want to live in a city near to where they work and their children go to school have to be subject to market corrections where a single massively financed pseudo-hotel can massively distort a major cost of living assignment? Ridiculous. This is where common-sense regulation is needed.
Why do you call it distortion? Its the opposite: the distortion is having empty properties, hotel taxes and zoning.
You make a weird argument: you mention the people that work in the city and want to live near it, and this argument has at least 2 flaws. The first one is that in a numbers game, the people that lose out on this exchange is a much smaller number than all the rest. That is, a small proportion of people see their conditions relatively worse because of how a third party does with their property. IF you put it up to a vote of all people involved, they would lose out big time.
The second is that you dont take into consideration that airbnb has made it cheaper and easier to travel for people of that socio-economic status as well. Its not only hipsters and software engineers that user airbnb. You have to weigh in the benefit of the consumer.
are you suggesting that the number of tourists and landlords combined is more than the number of people that disagree with housing units existing as permanent airbnb listings?
Nice, I hated feeling like I was doing something shady whenever renting AirBnBs in vancouver, they always had directions like don't talk to anyone, always mention that you were a relative from out of town, etc, so as not to attract attention.
A memorandum of understanding (MoU) is an agreement between two (bilateral) or more (multilateral) parties. It expresses a convergence of will between the parties, indicating an intended common line of action. It is often used in cases where parties either do not imply a legal commitment or in situations where the parties cannot create a legally enforceable agreement. It is a more formal alternative to a gentlemen's agreement.
And all of this demand-side management is going to do nothing for affordability. Housing affordability is a supply-side zoning issue and can be fixed very quickly:
- Unify/standardize zoning. The entire country of Japan only has about a dozen different zoning types. I see more than a dozen zoning types from my home office window.
- Stop going to council for spot upzoning. This should not be a council function. This should be handled by city operations.
- Upzone Grandview-Woodland and Hastings-Sunrise from RS-1 to RM-4. RM-4 is how Kitsilano is zoned. TADA! You’ve just created 50,000 housing units and solved the whole problem.
Zoning visualization: http://maps.nicholsonroad.com/zones/