Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
vancouver.ca
vancouver.ca
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/
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.
https://www.planning.vic.gov.au/policy-and-strategy/planning...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
It only takes about a year in the US: http://eyeonhousing.org/2015/08/how-long-does-it-take-to-bui...
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".
The fact that this didn't happen is due to regulation and other market distortions.
If you could wave a magic wand and do the same thing for food and water wouldn't you do so?
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.
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.
That takes a long time to play out, and other factors come in to play during that time.
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.
City of West Vancouver
District of North Vancouver
City of North Vancouver
To us, Vancity is a credit union. The only related abbreviation I hear time to time is "Van".
Watch now for a big increase in business licenses as those operators begin to do business under strawmen.
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.
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.
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".
It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good.
[1] http://vancouver.ca/doing-business/short-term-rentals.aspx
> Short-term rentals are allowed when:
> 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
If Vancouver finds itself short of houses by whatever measure, they have to look elsewhere.
If houses that would otherwise be rented or occupied are being used for short term rentals how can this be true?
I'll call this the Ibiza Quandary.
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.
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.
Do you have any sort of data to back up your claim that there are no empty properties?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorandum_of_understanding