AirBnb and Canada

[someone123]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

^3,000 units is substantial. Given that AirBnB has been around for about 5 years, and the City of Vancouver adds about 1,150 new rental units to its stock every year (p. 27), that means that the AirBnB growth rate was just over half of the growth of the rental stock during this time period.

This isn't an apples to apples comparison though (setting aside the fact that the 2,000 number suggested to me previously in this thread spontaneously grew to 3,000 in a counterargument posted shortly thereafter; surely Airbnb's growth rate isn't that high ). Many Airbnb units are just rooms, not full houses or apartments, and many of them are rented out only some of the time. For example, some might be rented out during a two-week period when the owners are out of town; those units would never have been available as long-term rentals. It's not correct to say that every Airbnb listing is a rental unit somebody's not able to live in full time.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by geotag277

There seems to be a large tendency among people living in Vancouver to use the argument that "this won't solve the whole housing problem therefore we shouldn't worry about it". You can substitute "this" with foreign investment, zoning, secondary suites, lane-way housing, AirBnb, or literally any other negative impact to the housing market for everyday Vancouver residents. In reality, Vancouver needs to be thinking about everything at once, and doing everything at once.

I think you are agreeing with me here. I explicitly said in my earlier post that the smaller contributing factors are worth worrying about. However, I think it is problematic that some highly visible factors like Airbnb get disproportionate airtime while other theoretically more easily directly controlled factors like zoning are mostly ignored.