British Columbia’s housing minister says legislation is on the way to better regulate short-term rentals as smaller B.C. communities are expressing concerns over affordability.

Laura Patrick, a trustee for Salt Spring Island, says a lot of the long-term rental housing in her community has been converted to short-term rentals, putting those working on the island in a bind when it comes to finding a place to live.

“Do we need to have some vacation rentals and private homes on our islands? Yes, but we need a reasonable amount and we need them to be managed really as part of the affordable housing umbrella,” she told CityNews.

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Patrick says provincial legislation to address the problem can’t come soon enough, with homes in her community being treated like hotels.

“We all hear stories of corporate buyers that come in and buy six, seven, eight houses and they’re renting them out. Those are hotels. They’re not helping the island. They’re not people who live here,” she said.

“We need some of the basic building blocks — we’re not the only community – all the islands are facing this. So, how do we get the support and help to build a fair process? Because I think that’s all the people are asking for.”

One thing Patrick is calling for is allowing individual municipalities to have more of a say in the approval of business licenses to oversee short-term rentals like Airbnbs and VRBOs.

“We need to start bottom up and what we need from the province is the tools to allow us to do that. If you come from a municipality you’re like ‘Gosh everyone has business licenses.’ We don’t. We don’t have them on our islands,” she said.

Legislation coming after 2021 recommendations, housing minister says

Two years ago, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) published a report outlining recommendations to the province on how to better regulate short-term rentals.

The recommendations include having the province take on more of a role in regulating vacation rentals, better sharing of data on short-term rentals, and more consistent taxation of them.

At a news conference on Wednesday, B.C. housing minister Ravi Kahlon says new legislation is coming based on the UBCM recommendations.

“Many communities highlight the lack of accessible data. Many communities, like Vancouver, just recently said ‘We have a system yet there’s many illegal operations.’ It’s hard for them to enforce the rules they have,” Kahlon said.

“I’ve been in conversations with ministers from Quebec and Ontario, talking to jurisdictions like California about what they’re doing, and this fall we’ll be introducing legislation to address the challenges that our partners in local government have highlighted for us.”

While he wasn’t able to provide any specifics on what the legislation may include, Kahlon acknowledged that there is still a need for short-term rentals everywhere.

“With the understanding that some of these types of short-term rentals are going to be here in the future because they’ve become important in communities, we think we’re going to find that balance and we’re going to bring the legislation in this fall,” he said.

Vacation rental issues a symptom of B.C.’s approach to housing: opposition

While Kahlon indicated action is being taken on the issue of short-term rentals, a member of the official opposition says the issue is the NDP’s fault in the first place.

“When the provincial government offers new supply as the solution, it leaves communities like the Southern Gulf Islands behind,” Adam Olsen, Green Party MLA for Saanich North and the Islands told CityNews.

“When you have a regulated housing market and then you have a piece of that housing market not regulated, that causes huge problems within that part of the market.”

Olsen says he’s heard from constituents that the split between short and long-term rentals causes some tension.

“On one hand, there’s an incredible need for places for people to stay because those islands’ economies are reliant to a great extent on tourism in the summer season. However, those units that are in short-term vacation rentals now, many of them were long-term rentals previously,” he noted.

The MLA is calling on the NDP to implement the recommendations that were outlined in the UBCM report, especially regarding business licensing processes for communities to oversee short-term rentals.

“Vancouver is a big city with a lot of money, and if they’ve not been able to actually have their registry be meaningful and be followed … then a small community is going to have even greater challenges with fewer resources,” he explained.

“We have 20 communities within the Capital Regional District, half a million people. And to think that we would have 20 different approaches to short-term vacation rentals is absolutely absurd.”

Additionally, Olsen says that the government needs to come up with solutions that have both short and long-term effects on the housing market.

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