[masom]

> shutting down any new housing construction for decades.

That's a problem. No one is saying it isn't.

The role of Airbnb cannot be ignored; it is negatively affecting housing availability as landlords can make much more profits on short-term rentals than long-term ones.

On the building side, we've made it much more difficult to build low/mid rise apartments buildings.

General accessibility requirements alone make it impractical to build anything less than 5 floors with a large land footprint (~20 units per floor). You pretty much need an elevator and other accessibility systems, which makes construction and maintenance of low to mid rises prohibitive. Older constructions are filled with grandfathered clauses allowing them to skip over accessibility requirements.

This is why you only see requests to build ~20+ floor buildings, which people disagree to be added in their neighbourhood.

ex: https://www.ontario.ca/page/accessibility-ontarios-building-...

> Barrier-free floor access is also required for residential and office buildings over:

> 3 storeys high

> 600 square metres in building area

[pitaj]

> The role of Airbnb cannot be ignored; it is negatively affecting housing availability as landlords can make much more profits on short-term rentals than long-term ones.

It can be ignored if it's insignificant - I haven't seen any evidence to show that banning short-term rentals significantly improves housing prices.

[masom]

Yes it can be ignored if it is insignificant, the issue arises when it isn't and long-term rentals are being transitioned to short-term. Cities and towns should have strict licensing requirements to control the effects. Airbnb itself does not matter as it's just a platform.

Some places have limited buildable land and Airbnb was taking over a lot of long term rentals.

Example of how this affects larger towns: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/montreal-tenant-receives-evictio...

[ta1243]

I rented vacation houses/apartments/etc well before airbnb -- indeed I've never used airbnb. My parents did the same thing in the 1980s, we got catalogues through.

[masom]

There's a difference between purpose-built rentals, and Airbnb taking over what should have been long term rentals.

I live in a resort town where we implemented strict rental licenses as otherwise the whole town would be on Airbnb, with nowhere for locals to live. There's no more land to build on within 50km. We're seeing a lot of housing be torn down and rebuilt as 4 unit townhomes on the same land.

The town is now attempting to balance between vacation homes and long term rentals, with fines for unlicensed Airbnbs.