ASK Salt Spring: Answered - EP 5 - Adam Olsen - Salt Spring Housing Issues

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Adam Olsen has some interesting insights and recommendations regarding Salt Spring housing issues

Welcome to the Cheer.fm podcast, Ask Salt Spring Answered. After many Ask Salt Spring events, we sit down in our studio with Gail Baker's guest and review some of the key points discussed. Welcome to episode five, where Damien Inwood sits down with Adam Olson again, but this time looking at housing issues in the second part of a two-part series from Ask Salt Spring Answered. Okay, I'm here with Adam Olson, our MLA for North Saanich and the Islands. And today's Ask Salt Spring session featured a conversation mainly around housing. And Adam, maybe you can just tell me what your main viewpoint was on short-term vacation rentals and how are we going to deal with them? And is the idea to limit the number of short-term vacation rentals or to turn short-term vacation rentals into full-time rental housing?

Well, I think to start, it is to get a sense of the call that the BC Green Caucus made earlier this week was to get a sense of the scale and the scope of the issue. As we've heard largely, I've heard clearly from my local government colleagues on the southern Gulf Islands, right here on Salt Spring, the impact that short-term vacation rentals has had on the long-term rental market. And there's no licensing or regulation or registry of short-term vacation rentals. I mean, this is one of the things about these disruptive platforms, digital platforms, was to take an unregulated part of the market and to disrupt it. And that was the intention behind it.

And companies that run these short-term vacation rental platforms have scraped you know billions of dollars uh you know out of the the uh the short-term rental marketplace which is largely just hotels and bed and breakfasts and and small inns and so what we were calling on the provincial government to do this week was to create a licensing scheme and to ensure that all short-term vacation rentals are licensed and to work with the platforms to ensure that we understand what the scale and scope of the issue actually is. And it will help us in making decisions about supply for housing and other aspects of the housing crisis that we're facing. Right, so there's obviously Airbnb and various other platforms that people use to find vacation rentals. And as I understand it, the provincial government gets a slice of tax from them because the hotel people got upset that they basically were being undercut by

these people. But you want to set up a registry, is that, would that be fair to say? People would actually register their B&Bs or whatever they're calling them and get a license from the provincial government to operate. Yeah, and then the platforms, in order to be able to promote them, would have to require that registry number and that license in order for them to be valid on. Let's use the example of, and the Islands Trustee Laura Patrick was on CBC talking about the current regulatory regime on the Southern Gulf Islands, and Salt Spring, where you can get an Airbnb or, you know, a unit off of another platform. And so despite the fact that it's not

allowed, the platforms continue to promote these units. And so what we're suggesting is that if you put a licensing regime in place and you have a registry number and then you require by law the platforms to only be able to promote units that have both of those in place, then we don't have, you know, we're starting to deal with the proliferation and the transformation of long-term rentals to short-term vacation rentals. Right. And is the next move after that then in some way prohibiting them and trying to get them to be converted into long-term rentals? No, I think that first of all, what it is, is to make sure that there's licensing and, you know, I think for occupant safety, also for the people who are operating these units for their safety as well, making sure that there's an ability to recognize the situation that currently exists. You know, I think that there is going to need to be a certain number of units that are available as short-term vacation rentals, and those will continue.

Some of those units might also available as short-term vacation rentals and those will continue those some of those units might also go into long term i think part of the challenge and we talked about this at the uh ask salt spring part of the challenge that we're facing right now is that we're building supply but the provincial government uh you know it was evidenced in the conversation that i had with the minister of housing a couple of weeks ago isn't even clear about what the scale and scope of the issue is. When we asked about what the housing stock in BC looked like, the Minister claimed that they collect the data, but they don't bring the data together and create a solid picture of it. So we're building supply, and it's just supply it's not necessarily targeted to the housing needs assessments that the municipalities are creating that the

the provincial government has created the housing supply act uh which is like intended i guess to to deal with that although we haven't seen it put in place yet. So it's an incredibly complex issue, and I think we start with having to understand what the scale and scope of it is by putting the data together, and then we can start to make policies that are targeted to creating the kind of supply that's needed in communities. We know in Salt Spring, for example, that creating workforce housing or making sure that some of the supply that exists is there for

for workforce is absolutely necessary we also know that there's other types of housing that that are not we don't need more of so it's it's a matter of being able to target and identify what the problem is and then create policy that then works towards finding a solution for that yeah now as part of this licensing would there be inspections as well then? Would you have to have a newly, a new body to go around and inspect Airbnbs or whatever? No, I think, I mean, the way we foresee it is that currently right now, it's largely up to local governments to do that end of it. But they don't have access.

There's no information for the provincial government, but there's also no way for the local governments to really understand what that landscape is either. So currently right now it's up to local governments, but the tools that we've created at the provincial government don't really help it's basically just we've downloaded the problem onto local governments i think what we're suggesting is it's still an acceptable place for this to be right for this to be in enforced or for the local governments to work with those people who are providing these units uh However, we need to, at the provincial government, be giving them the tools that are useful to them to be able to do the work that's needed. Yeah. Now, I know that when they were discussing the bylaw at the Islands Trust,

which was going to allow cottages on certain properties in different parts of Salt Spring that the Owens Trust admitted that they had no idea how many cottages there actually are in existence on Salt Spring. But you would think it wouldn't be that difficult for somebody to go around and have a look, you know, and perhaps count some of them up. But they don't seem to be able to do that. Well, the housing needs assessment in each community that the provincial government is now requiring communities to produce, and some of them were produced in partnership with the regional districts. Some of them were produced by each municipality in areas that are unincorporated,

in areas that are connected to regional districts. It's largely a more broad view. But I would say that there is a fairly decent understanding of, yeah, I think the municipalities and the local governments, say more broadly, because not, well, Salt Springs is unincorporated. So the local governments have say more broadly, because not, well, Salt Springs is unincorporated, so the local governments have a general idea. I think one of the things that, you know, I've heard repeated is that, you know, this idea that increasing the number of suites or increasing the number of cottages that are available without having the regulations for short-term vacation rentals in place just puts more, potentially more units into short-term vacation rentals in place just puts potentially more units into short-term vacation rentals.

So what that has identified is that all of these policies necessarily need to be part of the same framework. And one of the real challenges that I faced with our current provincial government is that they've put bits and pieces out, and it doesn't really feel like in any way that their policy measures are coordinated. At least we haven't seen how they're being coordinated on the ground yet. It feels like sort of a flurry of actions that are attempting to deal with a shortage of housing and a housing supply issue while looking to the same market

that has created a lot of the conditions that we're in to solve it. And, you know, we've been now dealing with this for the last six years. The government's taken some fairly strong demand side measures. They're now putting a considerable amount of money investing in supply side measures. And the number of people that are moving to British Columbia continue to increase at a rate higher than the number of units that we're building. We're still looking at housing as, you know, as commodified units, economic units, rather than as places where people can create security and create like a, you know, a secure place to build their lives from. And so we're looking at housing as economic units rather than as, you know,

interestingly enough, the government's recent plan that they announced, I guess a couple of weeks ago, is called Homes for People. But yet underlying that Homes for People plan, as they call it, is the economics of housing. And they've largely not looked at that or addressed it. And so it'll be interesting to see over the coming weeks and months how it translates on the ground to creating more secure homes for people. Now, one of the themes that seems to arise all the time with regards to the question of long-term rentals versus short-term rentals is that the Residential Tenancy Act seems to be skewed in the favor of the

tenant and not the landlord, and that landlords who've had bad experiences with bad tenants have have had difficulty in ejecting them or whatever because of the way that the act is written and that people are unwilling to take the risk of renting long term because of the danger of getting a bad tenant and not being able to deal with that. Is there also a move afoot to perhaps make it more fair or more easy for landlords, do you think, in the future? That certainly is what I've heard on Salt Spring time and again, that that's one of the reasons that people aren't doing it. Well, I've certainly heard that as well, and not just on Salt Spring. I've heard it across the riding, and, I've heard it across the province. You know, I think that one of the ways that I think short-term vacation rentals, those platforms have impacted the psychology around this,

is that if you're looking at how easy it is to get somebody out of your unit, out of your housing unit, it's much easier to get someone out of your unit, out of your housing unit, it's much easier to get someone out of a short-term vacation rental than it is out of a long-term rental. Right. And so I think that that needs to be put into it is that part of the psychology around this is that if, if, if that's what the focus is now, I don't want to suggest, I don't, I do not want to leave it here because I, I'm not going to suggest that everything that I've heard from people is that they're picking one over the other because of that. I've certainly heard challenges. I've certainly heard that some of the challenges around rent caps and making sure that the units can remain updated and people can invest in those properties.

And I've heard all of this. I think that there is no doubt that changes that have been made under this BCNDP government have strengthened the security for renters. And this is when I was part of the Rental Housing Task Force, and we hosted a meeting here in 2018 I think as part of that provincial tour that we went on one of the fundamental things that we were trying to always balance is the impact on both the renter and the landlord and you know I remember saying in a radio interview that one of the things that I know about this for sure is that every landlord needs a tenant

and every tenant needs a landlord that's's part of the relationship. And balancing this relationship is incredibly challenging because the, you know, the people have a right to housing and people have a right to security in their homes. And we want to achieve that as much as possible. And also, when especially when you're looking at the secondary rental market, those are houses that people have made an investment in. And so how do you balance those interests is very, very challenging. And it's one that I think no matter what a government does to tinker with those rules is going to be seen on one side of this as as imbalancing it i'd say that one of the measures that was put into place that um i haven't really seen uh to the level that i would like is is uh the registry of of people who are seen as bad landlords or bad tenants and making sure that the provincial

government the the enforcement arm of this that has been put in place to try to balance this um you know i don't think has got to the level that uh that we initially expected when it was announced back in 2018 or 2019 so you know i think i think this was this was the key challenge that we had in that committee and it remained or that task force i should say and it remains to be one of the challenges. And with every time the government makes a change, it creates, or at least it highlights the imbalance that exists, and we'll be consistently struggling with this. And I think that the key is to recognize that a stable society houses its people well. And we have a responsibility for that, and we also have to recognize that the people who have made the investments and who own those homes also need to be definitely acknowledged in that, or else they'll make decisions as well.

And we can see that the decisions that have been made, you know, sometimes are to take their house out of the rental market, and that has disastrous effects on where the teachers live and where the police live and where the nurses and doctors live and where the frontline workers live in a community. And that can cause other economic pains elsewhere. Now, just to get back to where we started on the idea of licensing, I guess, short-term vacation rentals.

Are you getting any feedback from the government side as to whether they think that's something they'd be interested in doing or where would it go from here? Well, we know that the provincial government, I believe it's in the mandate of the housing minister, we know that the government has received this advice. The BC Greens didn't come up with this necessarily. We recognize that technical work by the

Union of BC Municipalities has been done. We recognize that the provincial government you know started down the path by taxing short-term vacation rentals back in 2018 and the market has changed substantively and and indeed we know that the provincial government has been looking at this our goal here was to expedite that discussion we have yet another summer being passed here on on salt spring island uh certainly on the tourism side of it that's going to mean that there's going to be a bunch more people that can come here and stay but we also know on the tourism side of it that those people when they get here might not get the level of services

that they would expect in a community because the workforce doesn't have a place to live. So this is where the balance comes into play in the community. And it's not just the visitors that don't have support from the workers, but it's the year round residents that live here that when they show up to the hospital,

there's only one nurse on. Or when they show up, you know, when they call the RCMP, it takes a while because, you know, they're short-staffed. So, you know, I think the reality of it is that it impacts the quality of life in the community, both for the tourist and year-round. And so, you know, I think that's part of what we're trying to address here. And the short answer to your question, we know the government's working on this legislation.

We want the government to get on with it and get it on the table for us to debate. And unfortunately, we now get to the end of this spring session and we don't have it to debate. And so we're only assuming that it's going to come in the fall, which is one summer too late. Yeah. late yeah okay well thanks very much for coming in and chatting to us uh about uh the housing crisis really which we have on salt spring yeah there's nothing easy about this this issue there's uh you know in addition to the the issues that are being faced

right now there's uh you know i think I think the issues in communities surrounding the southern Gulf Islands are impacting it as well. And so how this all fits together is very, very challenging. And we'll continue to push government. We'll continue to ask questions. And we'll continue to put ideas, like we did with this one, ideas that are not new, but use the position that we have in the legislature as advocates to try to elevate these issues on the agenda. That's part of our role in opposition. It's not just to tell the government that they're always doing a bad job. That's the role of opposition to criticize and to test the public policy. It's also the role of the opposition to

propose ideas and to create tension on these ideas to get the government to move them forward. And that's what we're doing here. Right. Okay. Thanks very much. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you.