Unmoved by pleas from desperate homeowners, some Toronto councillors want self-contained basement apartments banned from Airbnb and other short-term rental services.

Planning committee members unanimously rejected a city staff proposal that secondary units, with their own kitchens and bathrooms, be included in new regulations on lucrative rentals of less than 28 days.

Their concerns Wednesday echoed those of Vancouver councillors who a day before enacted regulations that also ban short-term secondary unit rentals.

Councillor Ana Bailão, Mayor John Tory’s housing advocate, told fellow committee members that Airbnb has a place in Toronto but city council, when it finalizes rules on Dec. 6, can’t let long-term rental units for Torontonians instead host a parade of temporary visitors.

“We have an extremely unhealthy vacancy rate in this city,” said Bailão, one of Tory’s deputy mayors. “If you are a renter trying to find an apartment to live in this city, it is a really bad experience. It’s frustrating, it’s desperate, people are having a tough time and obviously it has an impact on rents.”

Doing otherwise would be a bad signal for a city working on removing barriers to laneway housing to alleviate the housing crisis, she added.

After public consultations, city staff proposed rules that would allow Torontonians to short-term rent their homes only if it is their principal residence.

That is meant to halt a stampede of investment units off the long-term market and onto daily or weekly rentals, with multiple units turning some buildings into “ghost hotels” with coming and going but few actual residents.

Airbnb hosts renting out up to three bedrooms, or their whole home for up to 180 nights per year, would pay the city $50 per year. Short-term booking agencies would pay the city a $5,000 licence fee and $1 a night per booking, and have policies to deal with noisy, disruptive tenants.

Councillor Gord Perks noted that an Airbnb host who lives in his Parkdale ward told the committee she gets about $2,000 per month for her basement apartment, when it’s fully rented out — a big premium over the $1,500 she estimated it would fetch as a regular long-term rental.

Of San Francisco-based Airbnb, Perks said: “I’m sick and tired of having to giving up on important pieces of public policies that benefit Torontonians because somebody wrote a book about the sharing economy.”

Councillor David Shiner, the planning committee committee chair, told colleagues: “We are not going to be able to stop the Internet . . . whether you call it sharing or helping or whatever, people are doing it.”

Earlier, during public presentations, Scarborough homeowner Paul Nedoszytko told councillors he and his wife renovated their basement and put the apartment on Airbnb four years ago when both were laid off within two months of each other.

Unlike most Airbnb hosts they have guests every night, Nedoszytko said, declining to tell councillors how much they earn. A rental site lists his unit as averaging $67 per night and he said it fetches more in summer.

“I have no pension, I have no drug plan, I have no dental plan,” said an emotional Nedoszytko. “We’re really behind the eight ball in terms of preparing for our future” and Airbnb will let them “age in place.”

Perks countered that he can point to 20 units where low-income seniors used to live that are now Airbnbs. “We are causing people to not be able to age in place because they are tenants.”

Another Airbnb host, Sophia Virani, told the committee she bought her Etobicoke home budgeting to rent out the basement unit on Airbnb.

“If Airbnb didn’t exist, I couldn’t buy this house,” she said. “My only way of affording that, and having children with a backyard, is to be able to rent it out short-term.”

Alex Dagg, Airbnb Canada’s public policy manager, told reporters she was “disappointed” in the vote but her hosts will keep telling councillors about the need to include basement apartments.

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“We think (the vote was) short-sighted and we think it’s harmful for families in Toronto,” Dagg said, adding owners of most self-contained units — 731 among Airbnb’s roughly 10,000 Toronto listings — want them free for visiting friends and family, so they wouldn’t be on the long-term market anyway.

The city has 1,759 registered “lawful secondary suites,” among a total of 526,000 rental units in Toronto, but cautioned there could be many more rented unlawful suites.

The proposed regulations will land Thursday before Toronto’s licensing committee, which will look at issues including whether homeowners should have to give the city proof of principal residence or, as city staff suggest, merely declare that to be true.