Every time Airbnb hits the news — ghost hotels, party houses, hidden cameras, the shooting death of three people in a Toronto rental — it serves as a reminder of unfinished business.

Toronto set out to regulate short-term rental platforms, including Airbnb, more than two years ago. It still hasn’t managed to get it done.

And if the experience of other jurisdictions is anything to go by, getting Toronto’s regulatory regime up and running will still just be the beginning, not the end, of its efforts to curb how this company operates.

Oakville, to use one example, has had rules in place since 2018 confining short-term rentals to the landlord’s principal residence and a requirement to pay a licensing fee. Yet Airbnb doesn’t follow those rules.

It seems it doesn’t like the fee structure so it simply ignores it while pressing the town to change it. In short, “they are operating in violation of the licensing bylaw,” says Oakville’s director of licensing.

In Burlington, the city actually had to go to court to deal with a party mansion that was causing mayhem for neighbours who repeatedly complained but received little help from Airbnb.

It took an Ontario Superior Court judge to give the city the right to physically block access with “barricades or vehicles” to get a resolution.

Toronto’s rules, which aren’t expected to be in force before the summer, restrict rentals to the landlord’s principal residence. That should eliminate ghost hotels and shift some condo units to the long-term market at a time when the city has a rental housing shortage and an affordability crisis. It should also reduce the number of homes used for parties, which disrupt neighbourhoods and, as was recently demonstrated in downtown Toronto, sometimes end tragically.

Given how long the city is taking to set up its regulatory regime — the provincial appeal tribunal upheld Toronto’s short-term rental bylaw three months ago — it should have every single i dotted and t crossed. That’s important. The city should give Airbnb no opening to ignore its rules, as the company has done elsewhere.

And Toronto should be prepared to enforce compliance if need be.

Airbnb has long operated in a grey zone and done well by it. If the coalition pushing for regulation, Fairbnb, has its numbers correct, three-quarters of Airbnb’s revenue in Toronto is generated by professional rental hosts who don’t live in the units they’re renting. Those will be banned once the regulations come into force.

Airbnb says it will comply with the city’s rules once they’re implemented. But not, it seems, a moment sooner.

Mayor John Tory and others have urged Airbnb to voluntarily adopt the city’s restrictions to immediately reduce problem rentals. The company has given that idea a hard pass.

Instead it has offered up yet more difficult-to-enforce internal measures to reduce party houses. Its latest promise was made last week in reaction to the shooting deaths in an Airbnb rental in Toronto.

Airbnb says it will stop renting entire homes to Canadian guests under 25 years of age in their own communities unless they have an established track record of good reviews. It set up a hotline and made a donation to Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns.

The company is clearly looking to stem the tide of bad publicity, just as it was when it announced a global party house ban in the wake of five deaths at a Halloween party in California.

A far better way to do that, though, would be for Airbnb to demonstrate a commitment to following rules and regulations even when it doesn’t particularly like them.

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Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms are used to operating in a legal grey zone.

Bringing them into the light won’t be easy. But it must be done.

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