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Femtosecond posted:* Improves the tourism economy by: I mean, this is a nice sounding narrative to promote about AirBnB but the marginal economic gain of an "omprove tourism economy" is almost certainly going to be outweighed by the the much more serious impact of increasing rental prices. Also I hate this approach where instead of trying to actually make a better community for residents we're told that communities should focus on attracting people with money from elsewhere to come spend that money on stores so that it can trickle down to the rest of us. And the "problem of short term rental" is nothing compared to the problem of "the rent is too god drat high" for most people. The main purpose of housing should be sheltering people, not providing investments for middle or upper class yahoos who want to make extra money. Maybe after we've solved the huge shortage of affordable living spaces we can worry more about the issues you're suggesting. blah_blah posted:I agree, but the essential aspect of regulatory capture here is the continued existence of the near-complete monopoly that the major taxi companies have. It's fine to give concessions to disability groups, or requirements for non-cash payment methods, or mechanical inspections, or whatever -- as long as that remains (and of course the costs of most of these can be passed on to the consumer, or people renting medallions, anyways). And really the only way to break something as entrenched as this is for a multinational corporation with near-infinite resources like Uber to do so. Obviously they aren't doing it for anything approaching altruistic means but it's hard to imagine how any parties that actually matter lose out here (and, btw, Uber has had options for passengers with disabilities for about a year now). Actually the other option would be some kind of political mobilization. When 19th century railroad or telegraph or utility companies became too over mighty the response were political movements that broke up trusts or socialized infrastructure. Letting uber replace the taxi companies in the hopes that this predatory cartel will be better than the last one makes me think of that Simpsons episode: quote:KENT In addition to this, you're destroying an industry that, whatever its flaws, provides a bunch of people with an income they can raise a family on or live a decent life, and replacing it with another industry that pays poverty wages, at a time when the economy really can't offer most of the people get screwed anything better. And the trade off is that drunk people can get home a bit cheaper and more conveniently. No thanks.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:46
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Why should I rent to long term tenants when I can make 3x more renting to short term business travellers?
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Feb 24, 2016 17:49
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Hopefully because the jackboot of the state is tightly pressed against your filthy property owning neck 
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Feb 24, 2016 17:52
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You should probably follow (by-)laws.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:52
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ChickenWing posted:You should probably follow (by-)laws. Yeah, let me run right out and get a license for my cat.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:53
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Helsing posted:Hopefully because the jackboot of the state is tightly pressed against your filthy property owning neck You are thinking about a country with a state whose touch is a bit more than a white velvet glove. I mean, the Canadian crown is prosecuting Duffy for receiving a bribe from Nigel Wright, whom is not charged with any offense.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:58
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PT6A posted:If they paid the tourism fee, which they absolutely should, does this stop being an issue? I would also agree that AirBNB rentals should not be allowed in any unit which is being subsidised as "affordable housing" on an ongoing basis. No, it doesn't. Because I live in a tourism-based town, but when there's no housing stock for people to actually live, you end up with issues like this summer when stores had to close down in peak season because there weren't enough workers, because availability is so low thanks to illegal air bnbs that rents have been pushed higher than what shop owners can afford to pay people for low end work. I live in a town of 10,000-ish permanent residents. What happens here basically follows the same trend as everywhere else, the only difference it just takes a little over 100 morons running illegal airbnbs to have an impact on the entire economy of the town. You multiply the numbers by quite a bit and the exact same thing happens in major cities.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:01
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Then clearly there aren't enough dwellings. They should build some more.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:04
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They are, to support an increasing number of people moving here. But the real problem is people illegally renting out their suites nightly when they are zoned for long term lodgings only, to specifically stop that problem.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:09
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hey hookshot, i'm playing a dirge on the world's tiniest violin for you
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Feb 24, 2016 18:09
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jm20 posted:I mean, the Canadian crown is prosecuting Duffy for receiving a bribe from Nigel Wright, whom is not charged with any offense. The crown even went so far as to not ask Mike Duffy a single question about the 90k during cross examination, talk about velvet gloves.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:12
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HookShot posted:They are, to support an increasing number of people moving here. But the real problem is people illegally renting out their suites nightly when they are zoned for long term lodgings only, to specifically stop that problem. Presumably there's a saturation point where demand for short-term rentals is low enough compared to supply that it ceases to be economically attractive to rent these units out on a short term basis. A dwelling is a dwelling is a dwelling. Yes, AirBNB and similar services should have to pay the same tourism fees and taxes as traditional hotels do, but apart from that I think you're fighting a losing battle.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:16
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Cultural Imperial posted:hey hookshot, i'm playing a dirge on the world's tiniest violin for you I have a job, and an apartment. It doesn't affect me at all. But it does affect other people that live here, and pretending it doesn't so you can feel good about getting your vacation rental is stupid and shortsighted. PT6A posted:Presumably there's a saturation point where demand for short-term rentals is low enough compared to supply that it ceases to be economically attractive to rent these units out on a short term basis. A dwelling is a dwelling is a dwelling. Presumably, but what happens if even in major cities that saturation point is high enough that it starts affecting people's abilities to live there? It doesn't take much to put upwards pressure on rents due to availability dropping, so it's automatically going to start affecting the poorest people in society, who need affordable housing the most.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:18
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PT6A posted:Then clearly there aren't enough dwellings. They should build some more. Toronto is in the midst of a massive construction boom and yet the rents keep climbing. This isn't a simple matter of supply / demand, it's the result of a broken system where housing is treated primarily as an investment rather than physical shelter.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:20
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is pot legal yet https://twitter.com/CBCAlerts/status/702540903190302721
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Feb 24, 2016 18:21
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HookShot posted:I have a job, and an apartment. It doesn't affect me at all. But it does affect other people that live here, and pretending it doesn't so you can feel good about getting your vacation rental is stupid and shortsighted. Then the municipality should step in to create or subsidize affordable rentals, where the conditions for being a tenant preclude short-term rentals. It's a much better solution than telling property owners what they can and can't do with their properties, or creating some flimsy legal fiction to justify why a furnished apartment is materially different from a short-term dwelling. Helsing posted:Toronto is in the midst of a massive construction boom and yet the rents keep climbing. This isn't a simple matter of supply / demand, it's the result of a broken system where housing is treated primarily as an investment rather than physical shelter. Then why did rents fall so precipitously in Calgary over the past year? Did every landlord suddenly have a change of heart when it came to what their property is for? Or is it because they could no longer find people willing to pay higher rates? I'm guessing it's the latter. Rental rates are set based on what people are willing to pay. Why should a landlord accept less?
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Feb 24, 2016 18:28
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Cultural Imperial posted:Fyi bylaws aren't laws lol forever edit: I will note that municipal law is basically the red headed stepchild of regulation.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:35
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Helsing posted:If you really want a sense of what the neighborhood is like then use google street view to move up and down Kipling. There's the occasional suburban style gas park with a few franchise restaurants or stores, and that's it. This place is a suburb, complete with the massive and basically dead arterial streets and the curving road-to-nowhere suburban side streets. It just happens to be filled with poorly maintained apartment buildings. Yes, but how many people live within walking distance of a transit stop is what matters most to its utility. Hugely uneven density causes other problems (namely, current and future slums, like St. James Town and Liberty Village), but potential transit users for a particular station/stop are not removed from the equation by how far off the ground they live.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:36
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PT6A posted:Then why did rents fall so precipitously in Calgary over the past year? Did every landlord suddenly have a change of heart when it came to what their property is for? Or is it because they could no longer find people willing to pay higher rates? I'm guessing it's the latter. Rental rates are set based on what people are willing to pay. Why should a landlord accept less? Calgary rental rates up slightly, while vacancy rate more than triples
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Feb 24, 2016 18:37
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That's odd. All my friends who rent have found less expensive places fairly easily over the past year, so I figured that was a widespread phenomenon in the city in general.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:43
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Helsing posted:I mean, this is a nice sounding narrative to promote about AirBnB but the marginal economic gain of an "Improve tourism economy" is almost certainly going to be outweighed by the the much more serious impact of increasing rental prices. Regarding the bolded: Maybe? Maybe not? I feel like the current state of discussion of Airbnb's impact on rental rates is analogous to the discussion of the impact of foreign capital on Vancouver's real estate valuations. There has barely been an effort to study the issue and the extent of the impact is unknown, driven largely by anecdote. The few studies I've read have been done by grad students in their spare time and have had methodology issues. The issue deserves a more thorough examination. On the Airbnb side I've not found any independent study on how much of an impact the service has on the local economy to read, so that's also an unknown too. I'll reemphasize that I do think that it would be reasonable for communities to regulate Airbnb. There has to be a balance between tourism and rental vacancy. Not every community is going to have the same needs. A winery region 100% centred around tourism might find that Airbnb is more beneficial to them than another region. It would be reasonable as well for a community to allow a certain form of Airbnb rental but not another. On a recent trip I stayed at a few Airbnb's that could not have been used for regular rental. In one case I was staying in someone's room in a house split to house several 20-30 year olds. His stuff was in the room and he was obviously just away for a long weekend. I don't see any issues at all with this sort of rental.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:47
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CanPol Megathread: Is Pot Legal Yet?
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Feb 24, 2016 18:53
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PT6A posted:Then the municipality should step in to create or subsidize affordable rentals, where the conditions for being a tenant preclude short-term rentals. It's a much better solution than telling property owners what they can and can't do with their properties, or creating some flimsy legal fiction to justify why a furnished apartment is materially different from a short-term dwelling. We already tell people what they can and can't do with their property all the time, and with good reason. It's illegal to rent places that don't have proper fire escapes or mold in the walls, you can't build a factory in a residential neighborhood, you can't dump heavy metals onto your front lawn. Get over it. Society is bigger than any one individual and it's entirely reasonable that we regulate the use of property based in part on an assessment of how your individual use of your property will impact the rest of the community. Also municipalities don't have the resources or political willingness to build affordable housing and the same developers who benefit form the current status quo would use their political power to try and block any municipal or provincial policies that actually exercised downward pressure on rental or housing prices. You can't escape the fundamentally political issue here which is that there's a conflict between people who want houses in decent neighborhoods to be treated as revenue generating assets vs. people who want these homes to essentially be a place where you live your life and maybe raise your family. In the real world you're basically going to have to pick one side or the other because while in theory we could do both that's completely unfeasible in a world where people with political power have a huge economic interest in keeping property values high. quote:Then why did rents fall so precipitously in Calgary over the past year? Did every landlord suddenly have a change of heart when it came to what their property is for? Or is it because they could no longer find people willing to pay higher rates? I'm guessing it's the latter. Rental rates are set based on what people are willing to pay. Why should a landlord accept less? Growth slowed but where's the evidence that it stopped? Based on Majuju's link it's still increasing even as vacancies soar. tagesschau posted:Yes, but how many people live within walking distance of a transit stop is what matters most to its utility. Hugely uneven density causes other problems (namely, current and future slums, like St. James Town and Liberty Village), but potential transit users for a particular station/stop are not removed from the equation by how far off the ground they live. Obviously density is a factor in transit planning, I'm just saying it cannot be examined in isolation. Only looking at a neighborhoods density would be like examining someone's risk of diabetes based on genetics while ignoring their lifestyle and diet. Femtosecond posted:Regarding the bolded: Maybe? Maybe not? I could not agree more that we desperately need to study this issue in greater depth. One concern I have, however, is that the existence of services like AirBnB is feeding into the mindset that houses are primarily an investment rather than a home. This is going to reinforce the existing block of voters who have invested their economic fortunes in high housing prices. When we step back and look at the Canadian economy we see a country with massive housing issues, foremost among them affordability, where our political leaders are explicitly committed to protecting home equity. It's just beyond insane. As returns to labour have diminished with the collapse of the industrial economy our middle class has turned to their over valued homes as their only hope for maintaining their current lifestyles, and the result is that the government(s) face(s) a huge block of voters who are likely to punish them for any policies that impact home values. We can't just look at these issues from a technocratic perspective. We have to take into account the different interest groups that are created by a distorted housing market. So while I wouldn't primarily blame AirBnB for any of this it seems like a move in the wrong direction. I fear that it's going to turn out to have been yet another way in which property owners are given bad economic incentives that will further solidify them into a block opposing any kind of sane housing strategy.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:56
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Expected to see a whooole lot of mealy-mouthed justifications for why vacationers get to enjoy cheap but illegal holiday accommodation in a neighbourhood at the expense of people trying to live there. Was not disappointed. We don't want or need careful study and consideration: we need Airbnb to gently caress off and stop profiting from illegal rentals.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:57
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Femtosecond posted:Regarding the bolded: Maybe? Maybe not? I think HookShot's point was actually that AirBnB is actually worse for tourism-focused regions, because the distortions to the rental market are correspondingly greater.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:57
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THC posted:Expected to see a whooole lot of mealy-mouthed justifications for why vacationers get to enjoy cheap but illegal holiday accommodation in a neighbourhood at the expense of people trying to live there. Was not disappointed. You still haven't satisfactorily explained why a vacationer staying in a furnished apartment for a month, which you think should be legal, is less damaging to the poor dears who want to "live" there than a one-week rental. I'm less interested in justifying AirBnB and more interested in how you and HookShot justify the difference between a legitimate rental and a dirty, evil, cackling vacationer twirling their moustache as they deny a rental to a hard-working labourer.
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Feb 24, 2016 18:59
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A room rents month-to-month for let's say $650 a month, while the same room rents on airbnb for $650 a week. One thing is legal and the other isn't (unless the host lives in the same house and is not renting out more than one room I think). You suggested airbnb the company would release internal statistics to help municipalities with planning but this is laughable, they would never release that data because it would reveal the extent to which they are profiting from illegal listings. In NY state they only did so after they were forced to by a court order.
Juul-Whip fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Feb 24, 2016 |
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Feb 24, 2016 19:05
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THC posted:A room rents month-to-month for let's say $650 a month, while the same room rents on airbnb for $650 a week. [citation needed] I think you're either way underestimating what a furnished apartment/"executive suite" rents for, or way overestimating the premium that AirBnB landlords are making, or maybe both. AirBnB was actually cheaper than the furnished apartment I rented for a month when I was in Madrid.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:10
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We get it PT6A, you hate the government and its regulations.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:12
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Regulations own.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:13
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I don't think any of you have brought into picture that people who derive income using airbnb are not paying taxes on this income. So we have moved from having the under the table money being cash only transactions to being an electronic transaction using a business relationship relationship between a contractor and the company itself as a means to obscure income from the government. These companies have no obligations to report the receiver to the government as recipients of this type of income. We need to double the CRA budget and crack down on this right now.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:13
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Drunk Canuck posted:We get it PT6A, you hate the government and its regulations. That's not what I'm talking about in the least! I'm asking what THC thinks the difference is between a furnished apartment that's rented month to month, and one that's rented week to week. So far the answer is "one is legal and the other isn't" as if laws are immutable and/or justify themselves by the very fact of their existence. I'm open to the idea of regulation, as I've already proposed in this thread. I think, certainly, the government should take a far greater role in the provision of affordable housing. I'm just curious what people think the regulations should be, so that they can discourage bad behaviour and promote desirable behaviour. This is like asking pro-lifers what they think the actual regulations and punishments surrounding abortion should be. They've identified what they see as a severe problem, yet no one has thought through any of the consequences. AirBnB probably does distort the rental market to some degree, and should be regulated in some way. I think we can all agree on that. No one who's been arguing with me actually has proposed any reasonable form of regulation that wouldn't undermine the very act of being able to rent your property to someone else, while at the same time eliminating the negative externalities of short-term rentals.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:19
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quote:http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/kerry-diotte-sorry-for-juvenile-tweet-about-liberal-buzz-word-bingo-1.3460245?cmp=rss  I liked their bingo board.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:20
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There's actually a site that scrapes Airbnb and bins things based on categories like type of dwelling, availability, and frequency of rental. The Vancouver data and the aforementioned (slightly outdated) grad student work estimates 2,800 or so whole-unit rentals via Airbnb, or ~2.1% of the City of Vancouver's "dwellings occupied by renter households". This obviously seems like a small number but when you stack it against a 1% overall vacancy rate you'd probably be tripling Vancouver's vacancy rate if the vacation/short-term rentals weren't there. which probably wouldn't affect rents at all, going by the Calgary article I linked earlier 
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Feb 24, 2016 19:23
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When we visited Netherlands we stayed in an airBnB. It was the cheapest place we could find that still had a kitchen and was in a nice walkable location. It was an apartment in a small building with a few other units on a very cozy very residential street. The owner told us they bought the unit entirely to use for airbnb. They remodeled it to be a bit more hotel-like and it's their 2nd unit they've purchased to do just this, they plan on buying more as it's good money. When they bought the building it was primarily a middle of the road little residential building that needed some work, now all the units are owned by investors of some sort that rent them out via various services. Some do airbnb, others do longer contracts generally for people who have short work contracts in the city, but none are lived in full-time by citizens of the city. This was in a very historic city where new construction was essentially impossible in the core, so every airbnb conversion was one less place to house a local citizen. One could of course do a study purely on the economics of this, we generally weigh if something is "good" or "bad" for a town or community purely on economics. Maybe the tourists spend more and bring more money to the city than if the buildings were used for permanent housing. Maybe tourist spending doesn't outweigh the lack of housing driving away potential permanent employees for local industries. But there's other factors beyond the economic. What do the people of the city want, what does the neighborhood want? The person driven out of their neighbourhood by tourist money isn't really benefiting unless he owns a tourist rental, or is involved in the tourism sector. If he works in a local factory none of this is trickling down to his family, it's just the cost of living going up and his neighbourhood becoming totally tourism focused. At the same time you don't want current locals having total control over their neighbourhoods, that leads to rampant nimbyism which is not good for cities. In Victoria, outside of downtown (and even in downtown) every single project no matter how big or small is fought against by the local community groups. 4 story apartment in a neighbourhood of 4 story apartments? It's going to kill the charm of the neighbourhood! If neighbourhood groups had their way nothing new would ever be built and all existing rentals would be torn down and replaced with more upper middle class detached homes. Imagine the property values!! And I guess this comes back to Helsing's argument that the problem is that we see housing as an investment, as a sector of the for-profit economy just like any other. Right up to the city planning and zoning level the plans are not designed with mindset "how to make the city function smoothly, how to comfortably house our population? How to best plan for future growth?" it's entirely about making existing owners feel safe and secure in their property values and paranoia about any sort of change while still allowing developers to pad the city coffers with development fees. This generally means dumping formaldehyde on wealthy single family neighbourhoods, assuring them that they will never have to face the horrors of gradual natural densification, while putting all new development in expensive "density ghettos" in certain places downtown, or way the gently caress away from transit in the suburbs.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:25
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We should as a general rule resist anything that further encourages people to treat housing stock as primarily being an investment opportunity rather than a physical shelter. One way to do that is finding ways to make AirBnB and similar services harder to operate, perhaps by cracking down on all the existing laws this service violates. You can't really be neutral or technocratic here, you have to pick sides. Do you want to be on the side of the economic forces that are trying to turn literally everything in life, from health to food to housing to entertainment to education, into investments whose value is set by a fluctuating an chaotic market place that encourages speculation, inequality and poverty, or do you want to resist these forces and fight for a world where people are guaranteed some basic economic and social security around which they can plan their lives. Believe me PT6A, no one is holding their breaths regarding which side you're on, but lets at least be clear about the underlying issues at play. This isn't a technical question, it's a matter of values. What should the main purpose of a home be: a place where people live, or an investment off of which a lucky few can gain income streams at the expense of the rest of the community? I actually think there's a lot of potential for services like AirBnB to make positive contributions to society, but in the political economy we actually have it is not playing a positive role, or rather any positive role it is playing is seemingly outweighed by the negative impact. As a not great analogy: for one person a beer or a scotch is a great way to relax, but for a different person (i.e. an alcoholic) it isn't. The drink is not so much the issue as the drinker. And that's the problem here: the actual impact of AirBnB in the world we actually live in right now at this moment is not good. And that's not because the idea behind AirBnB is fundamentally evil, it's just that when you fit it into the current context it produces a negative outcome.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:31
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Should hotels be heavily restricted? These are, after all, large buildings which could be used to house people. I agree with you, Helsing, that it's absolutely a bad thing to continue down the path of viewing housing as an investment as opposed to a place to live. It's unquestionably harming our society, and it looks like it's going to get worse before it gets better. My issue is that short- and medium-stay facilities also provide a necessary and useful service for society, and the niche that AirBnB is exploiting is as much about providing a product that never existed before as it is about competing on price with existing offerings. If it was up to me, I'd just say raise the property tax on any property which is not used primarily by the owner of the property, and redirect the money gained through that to subsidize long-term renters and services for long-term residents. Further: what inherent value is there to having long-term residents or "members of the local community?" How would you define these things? I don't really have an answer, to be honest with you. What value do I contribute to anything by occupying my condo on a regular basis that is not equally served by having 52 different people occupy my condo for one week per year each? What about my neighbours? Is my life meaningfully different because the same person is on the other side of the hall, instead of a succession of different people? Ultimately, dwellings are indeed places to live, but when people are living some place for a short period of time, they don't cease to be people or cease to require shelter. PT6A fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Feb 24, 2016 |
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Feb 24, 2016 19:47
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Ikantski posted:Wynne says cap-and-trade plan will add about 4.3 cents a litre to gas prices I swear every time that woman opens her mouth we have to open our wallets. Just in the past few weeks its been what, 3 new "revenue" streams for the government?
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Feb 24, 2016 19:48
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You know what else we should do in addition to banning Uber and AirBnB? Give everyone a job that pays 90k/year. Also, make layoffs illegal. Nationalize Whole Foods and expropriate all luxury car dealerships for the greater good.
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Feb 24, 2016 20:10
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Cultural Imperial posted:You know what else we should do in addition to banning Uber and AirBnB? Give everyone a job that pays 90k/year. Also, make layoffs illegal. Nationalize Whole Foods and expropriate all luxury car dealerships for the greater good. This but force everyone to drive American luxury cars
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Feb 24, 2016 20:11
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