Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
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Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#2There was no definition of MOU in the article.
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
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#3The 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 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
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#4This 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.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#5This seems like reasonable regulation.
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/
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#6This 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 18…
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:
City of West Vancouver
District of North Vancouver
City of North Vancouver
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#7This 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 18…
>>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.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#8This seems like reasonable regulation. 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 s…
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.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#9This seems like reasonable regulation. 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 s…
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.”
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#10This seems like reasonable regulation. 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 s…
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 reas…
This is not empiracly true for Vancouver. Global capital is flooding into RS-1 and CD-1. There is very little speculation into RM-4.