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Tax Airbnbs, ease rental squeeze: Coun. Geoff Young

The province could help ease Victoria’s tight rental market almost overnight by requiring condos used as Airbnbs to be assessed and taxed as commercial properties, says Victoria Coun. Geoff Young.
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Ogden Point, the Inner Harbour and Victoria's skyline.

The province could help ease Victoria’s tight rental market almost overnight by requiring condos used as Airbnbs to be assessed and taxed as commercial properties, says Victoria Coun. Geoff Young.

“For some reason I find absolutely unfathomable, the provincial government will not allow proper assessment of those Airbnbs, which is one of the main reasons why they continue to exist,” Young said. “That would create more housing occupied by people living in the city probably than any two or three of the policies we’ve been looking at today.”

Young’s comments came as councillors were discussing Phase 2 of the city’s housing strategy — a document designed to serve as a roadmap for city housing initiatives until 2022.

Young took issue with the strategy’s focus on providing rental housing, particularly for lower- income households. He suggested such policies might backfire, as has Victoria’s long-standing policy of not allowing new condo developments to prohibit rentals.

“I suggest that if we had adopted exactly the opposite policy, saying you must prohibit rentals in your building, we would actually have done more for providing affordable housing in the city than we did,” Young said. “We would have created more owned housing than we did and the effect of our policy was to create a whole bunch of Airbnbs.”

Young noted that the bulk of the city’s affordable housing stock was built in the 1960s and 1970s in James Bay and Fairfield, but at the time it was built as market-priced housing.

“When you build other housing that may not be immediately affordable, whether it’s condos or higher-cost rentals, some people will go to those buildings and leave available for those with lower incomes some of the older buildings,” Young said.

But others, such as Coun. Sarah Potts, said the city doesn’t have the time to wait, and affordable housing is needed now.

Coun. Jeremy Loveday said the first phase of the housing strategy, which focused on housing for family incomes between $18,147 and $57,772, might have “left behind the people who needed housing the most and, in some ways, delivered more housing of the types that we don’t need as much of.”

He added: “I think that this housing strategy turns that corner and my only hesitancy here is, for me, does it go far enough in that direction.”

Goals in the strategy include increasing the supply of housing for low- to moderate-income households and providing more housing choice. The document says Victoria needs 2,800 new housing units over the next five years. Of those, 442 should be for households making below $19,999; 448 should be for households making between $20,000 and $34,900; 527 should be for households making $35,000 to $54,999; 615 for households making $55,000 to $84,999; and 768 for households with incomes of more than $85,000.

Mayor Lisa Helps said the strategy has both sticks and carrots. “There’s a lot in there for the development community and the home-building community to build more rental homes,” Helps said.

She said she was happy to see prezoning made a priority, to identify where the city wants rental housing — “to pre-zone it and say if you build rental housing here, you can have bonus density and, if you don’t, you can’t. I think that that will get us what we want.”

The document says that the city needs more bachelor units downtown for tech workers, more two- and three-bedroom units close to schools for families with low and moderate incomes, more accessible housing for seniors and people with disabilities, and more ways to bridge the gap between rental and ownership.

bcleverley@timescolonist.com