
Toronto eyes plan to crack down on Airbnb-style rentals - tejohnso
https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/06/12/toronto-eyes-plan-to-crack-down-on-airbnb-style-rentals.html
======
kbos87
I stayed in an Airbnb in Toronto last year. It was a beautiful new building in
a trendy neighborhood. The unit was very clearly setup for continual airbnb
rentals and wasn't anyone's primary residence.

Only after booking was I given very specific and careful instructions on how
to avoid any interaction with other residents or building security, entering
and leaving through the parking garage.

During my stay I felt like a criminal, even though I quickly figured out that
this was a pretty normal thing in this particular building, which was known
for loud parties and inconsiderate visitors.

What a terrible experience for me as the guest and the people who have to put
up with strangers constantly coming and going.

Airbnb is cool when we're talking about a vacation home or occasional rental
of your primary residence - not as a clandestine hotel. I'd be willing to bet
that most people, homeowners or responsible renters agree with that, Airbnb's
growth goals be damned.

~~~
52-6F-62
There's a high probability that's my building. It's known for all of those
things, and AirBnB stays have long been against building policy for that
reason.

I could care less -- I'm a renter, not an owner here -- but the parties do get
real stupid and leave the place a real mess. I'm talking urine in the
elevators on a Monday morning stupid.

Most days there are people coming in and out with luggage. It's kind of
ridiculous.

~~~
kbos87
This was the place -

[http://globalnews.ca/news/2080213/two-people-shot-in-
toronto...](http://globalnews.ca/news/2080213/two-people-shot-in-torontos-
west-end-possibly-fatal/)

"She called it a 'party unit' and said it seemed like there had been a party
going on for three days straight."

~~~
52-6F-62
Well, nope. Not mine. I guess it's not such a rare occurrence anymore.

Funny, I used to live in a less trendy neighbourhood and I hardly ever saw
AirBnB-ers...

I live in Liberty Village now, as a result of getting the boot from my last
place because the owners wanted to take it over. They visited for the first
time while I lived there. The buildings down here that aren't the million-
dollar lofts seem to be rampantly used for AirBnB stays -- mainly as a party
location -- often with people from the city who just wanted a place they
didn't care about.

------
mandude
There's a lot of cities trying to figure out how to handle Airbnb -- Barcelona
for example is cracking down on unlicensed AirBNB's -- and the reason is the
resulting rent increases.

Like taxis and taxi cab companies taking their hatred out on Lyft or Uber, I
do believe that technology changes economies and that this will be another
example of a misled attempt to prevent a technology from changing a city's
economy. I also believe that many times these preventative measures are led by
lobbyists by the very industry that is being hurt by the technology, and in
this case it's likely hotels -- but then blaming it on rent prices.

It'll be great to see where all this leads, but making it illegal and taking
it out on owners or drivers is going the wrong direction.

~~~
reza_n
Not sure if ride sharing and home sharing are the same thing.

Ride sharing disrupted the cab industry, gives a large amount of the
population access to cheap and plentiful transportation, and cars are
plentiful too. The loser is the cab industry and the winner is the general
population.

Home sharing is disrupting the hotel industry, but its customers are tourists
and non locals, and housing stock is very limited. So city populations are
going to be paying higher housing costs since they are now competing with
entrepreneurs (serving tourists and non locals) for the same units. In theory,
rents may continue to increase until they find a balance with hotel rates.
Here the losers are hotels and long term renters and the winners are short
term renters, property owners, and entrepreneurs.

Different economics at play here.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
There's also the externalized cost of disrupting communities. AirBnB is
significantly changing the dynamic of where these people live and they get
nothing in return for it.

I find it interesting that people who normally are so pro-contract (you can
contract away your right to sell a printer cartridge) seem to be in the other
camp when it comes to dwellings (well of course you don't have to abide by the
contract saying you won't rent it on AirBnB) or just silent on the issue.

~~~
anthonybullard
I'm failing to see how this relates to contracts in reference to home sharing.
When someone buys they're home, did they sign a contract saying"The
undersigned agrees that nothing will ever change within 10 miles from the
property."? Or are you talking about people renting against actual contractual
prohibitions against short term rentals and subletting?

------
opportune
The solution to the "Airbnb problem" of rising home costs is less regulation,
not more. It's the same situation in virtually every other city: housing
regulations preventing increased vertical development are the true culprit,
not services like airbnb which in my opinion are a positive force for home
prices due to them adding "housing liquidity" to the market. Sure, in the
immediate short term an airbnb rental property buying spree could raise house
prices, but once housing prices are high enough, real estate developers will
realize that they can just build bigger/more buildings.

That said, I do think it is fair for airbnb rentals to be subject to the same
taxes and regulations as hotels.

Edit: I don't mean that housing liquidity raises or increases home prices. I
think that would be tough to say. I just mean that it's good for the housing
market from a consumer standpoint: it creates a kind of flexible vehicle for
dealing with short term housing needs. It's better as a society for us to have
a way to rent somewhere for a week than to not have such a way to do that (and
hotels only offer a very specific kind of residence, which is not to
everyone's taste).

~~~
josephdviviano
While Toronto does need to cut back on development regulations, we've been
developing like crazy. A good deal of speculative money had pumped housing
prices above what most people can afford in a very short period of time.
AirBnB is part of that problem.

In Toronto they estimate you need to make ~130k / yr to afford a home (any
home). Bear in mind that a software dev in Toronto makes ~80k / yr. Up until
very recently, our lower wages matched a lower cost of living in the city, but
this has been blown up by things like foreign investment, and locals taking
out a line of credit on their main home to put a down payment on income
generating properties. __No other sector in Toronto has seen price inflation
like this, it 's only been housing. __

The problem with the deregulation thesis is that you now have to compete with
a lot more people for resources. In the housing case, you now are competing
with people who live in completely different economies or have substantial
economic advantage over you. As an example, a Toronto home is extremely
inexpensive to a bay area software dev making ~150k / yr (CAD ~200k). As a
side hustle, this might seem like a good investment, and locals simply can't
compete.

(I realise bay area rent is insane and this isn't likely fair without taking
bay area cost of living into account, I just wanted to use a relevant
example).

~~~
52-6F-62
Where are you getting the ~80k salary figure? (edit: sincere question!)

My experience sees an average of 10 to 30k less than that within the city save
a couple of outlets (at the developer level).

The rest of what you're saying is totally valid. Most of the places I've
rented have been owned by people living at (put mildly) great distances from
the city. This seems to be a common experience.

~~~
josephdviviano
To be honest the number is sort of hearsay. I didn't mean 80k as an entry-
level pay, but it seems to be about right in my experience (downtown core
jobs).

~~~
52-6F-62
I'd classify you as lucky, but maybe that's just from my position. I make
significantly less working in the downtown core as well. I'm not a senior
staff member, but I'm not entry-level either. Either way, I guess it leaves me
with some hope.

------
canistr
The problem with AirBnb is that if you live anywhere in the downtown core
(particularly King West in Toronto), you're likely to encounter AirBnbs being
rented out to parties. And especially on a consistent basis. It's extremely
annoying in condos when you have loud obnoxious guests who rent it for a
weekend night not just in their units, but in the hallways.

Not to mention, that consistently in a condo that my family owns, we
consistently see weekend warriors leaving empty beer bottles and garbage in
the elevators and condos.

Yeah, it's not technically AirBnb's fault or even necessarily the condo
board's fault. It's partially a result of living in an area with irresponsible
young people combined with short-term renters who don't care. But when rules,
bylaws, and laws have no real teeth, people aren't incentivized to actually
deal with the problems that neighbouring tenants face.

------
orthoganol
At least the proposal allows for full apartment rental any x months of the
year, it's just you can't be an AirBnB landlord and snap up a bunch of units
you don't live in.

Still true to the spirit of AirBnB without housing market externalities.
Sounds like an ideal model for cities.

------
paulpauper
How would a city officials detect when a home is being used for rental ,
versus having guests over

~~~
warcher
You don't have to catch them all, just enough to make some examples. If you're
not doing some kind of greyball uber shenanigans, one semi-competent police
officer can close the circle on _somebody_ pretty easily.

------
Dave_TRS
I'm from Toronto and work in the apartment rentals industry, and I think it's
pretty clear that nobody actually believes that Airbnb rentals are having any
sort of real impact on home prices and rents in the city. Since Airbnb
listings in units people purchased just to Airbnb make up such a tiny portion
of the housing stock, it's not sensible to think that this regulation is
really targeted at impacting rents.

It's also worth mentioning that unlike NYC and SF where this may actually be a
real issue, buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a
profitable way. Airbnb rents in most parts of Toronto make it impossible to
turn a profit worth the hassle, and most I know who have considered it decided
not to based on the economics.

I suspect the political motivations are the mayor (who is generally sensible)
wanting to be seen at least doing "something" to address rising rents, as well
as catering to the various industry lobbies and other politicians who are
generally uncomfortable with any industry operating in a largely unregulated
way.

~~~
philfrasty
„...buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a
profitable way...“

So you are saying it is more profitable to rent out longterm than short-term?
Totally not my experience. Hosts on Airbnb easily make 3x to 4x the usual rent
(Munich, Germany), even far outside the city center. But might be purely city
related...

~~~
kbos87
Looking purely at cash flow, it isn't profitable to buy and rent out an
apartment in a lot of American cities at least.

~~~
Dave_TRS
Agree. I have investment properties in a few cities, and consider airbnb only
as an option of last resort to fill vacancies. The daily rates seem high on
the surface, but the turnover, vacancies, risks, management costs all eat away
at the profits.

------
warcher
I mean, they cut a deal with Japan that legalizes Airbnb rentals and allows
for local regulation-- why not Canada?

~~~
jacquesm
Different sovereign entity.

You could just as easily say 'why Japan?'.

~~~
warcher
The issue with cutting a deal with Japan, as I see it at least, is that there
are all these other countries where you now have to answer the question "Well,
if you were willing to deal with _____, why not me?" As it appears that Japan
has a deal that Canada, or America for that matter, can't get, now Airbnb is
going to have to explain why, beyond being (so far) successful in playing
different sides against each other.

------
yourapostasy
Alternate perspective on perma-rented AirBnB listings (that is, properties
exclusively used full-time for AirBnB rentals): it is an externalization of
unaccounted for costs in the degradation of the commons, and raising overall
risks upon permanent residents. This is currently an unsolved problem, messily
left to the permanent residents who are adversely-impacted to handle on their
own. I'm not personally affected, but read about these points raised in
municipal ordinance discussions about banning short-term rentals.

The stories about trashed public areas, even frequent instances of vomit,
urine, and feces found in stairwells and elevators, are common, and some are
even brought up in this thread. Who bears the cost (materials, time and/or
labor) of clean up?

When the guests stay only 2-3 nights, and hold a raucous party on the last
night that keep waking up the next door neighbor's infant, that degrades the
commons. Sure they're gone by the following morning, sure the owner can ban
that specific renter from ever renting the property again, but the key
difference between a permanent resident and a short-term renter is the next
door neighbor no longer has the assurance of reasonably-consistent behavior.
The owner can even be well-intentioned, but let slip partiers through their
screening enough that there will never be a season when the next door neighbor
doesn't have to work with the police on a noise complaint. Always with new
people they've never met before so there is no common base to work from.

Every time a short-term renter comes through, there is a nearly-imperceptible
increase in the risk to the surrounding residences. Even in places where
neighbors barely know each other, knowing by sight still represents a kind of
commons. Even discounting the crime risk, there is the natural human instinct
to put up your guard around "the other"; there is a small element of stress
raised around this constant flow of short-term renters through a residential
area. Years of crime data definitely prove relative anonymity raises risk
profiles, but no hard metrics have been teased out of that to my knowledge,
sufficiently to allow us to build predictive models around short-term renter
effects.

It is easy to flippantly say the courts will handle these issues, but that is
a tacit acknowledgement that the issues are a systemic pattern, not one-off
freak occurrences that fall way off the edge of a Monte Carlo chart. When it
is a pattern, then that is a cost externalization by the business. I'm seeing
_a lot_ of this behavior by businesses of all stripes, trying to gain an edge
by monetizing any behavior that cannot be readily accounted for, especially in
individual cases, yet in aggregate over time yield benefits to the business
with asymmetrical costs borne by bystanders. This concentrated-benefits-
dispersed-costs problem has been discussed [1], but to my knowledge no
definitive solution exists yet, and in this case the challenge is even greater
because the costs like increased, inconsistent and chronic stress, are
difficult to assess.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action)

------
glangdale
Constantly amazed by how many people rock up here, like clockwork, to defend
an the unlimited take on this business model: "Oh, it's just the hotel
industry that hates this", "If only we just built like crazy Airbnb wouldn't
be a problem". Riiiight, all we need to do is live in unregulated megacities
and the magic of the market will deliver.

Here's the thing: a lot of people out there bought homes and apartments in
countries that had these funny things called 'laws', where they expected that
they were going to live in communities, not surrounded by rentiers running
random hotels sans staff and regulation. A lot of apartment buildings in
Sydney are essentially now completely fucked by this - you buy an apartment
and find out you're living in party central and your neighbours are a never-
ending collection of randos.

I think it's pretty clear from the extent that these companies go to obfuscate
the actual addresses of the houses that they are not working with clean hands
here. That aspect of the business model should be flat out illegal. Oh, you're
going to operate a hotel, but you're not going to tell anyone where it is?

~~~
nsnick
AirBnB provides an invaluable service. Without them, it would be completely
impossible to move somewhere for a month or two to find out if you want to
live there. Without AirBnB there is no short term rental market. No one
outside of AirBnB will give you a lease of less than a year. I have no idea
how people moved to other cities for a short period of time before AirBnB.

~~~
skylark
Before AirBnB, people would sublet their apartments - I've never personally
had trouble finding one to three month accommodations.

You're correct that the extremely short term rental market (2 weeks and below)
didn't really exist before, and AirBnB did streamline the entire process.

------
rectang
Hypothesis: The partiers urinating in the elevator and the HN posters who are
utterly unsympathetic are one and the same.

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541852)
and marked it off-topic.

