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Which brings us to the most controversial part of Vancouver’s draft bylaw: the proposal to restrict short-term rentals in secondary suites. In her editorial, Dagg argues it’s no loss to the rental market to let a secondary suite owner rent it on Airbnb if they never intended to rent to a long-term tenant. She insists doing so will help residents pay high mortgage costs. It’s a clever effort to reframe Airbnb from an enemy of home renters into a friend of home buyers.

There’s two problems with these claims. First, secondary suites (and their laneway home cousins) are separate units, with certain rights attached. A key reason Vancouver made them legal in traditional neighbourhoods in the first place was to add affordable long-term rental housing supply. If the goal had been to make it easier for people to run home-based businesses, the city would have legalized a dozen other disruptive commercial uses in homes, too. They didn’t.

If Vancouver exempts secondary suites from the new bylaw, homeowners will face the same temptation they face in other cities already. Owners will all claim they no longer want to rent to the long-term market. And why would they, when they can make three times as much churning tourists through their suite instead? Investors will sweep in to buy homes with suites for their hotel value, not their housing value, driving up the cost of housing even more.

The City of Vancouver should flip Airbnb’s argument around. Since these suites were legalized to increase the stock of affordable long-term rental housing, if the owner wants to take their unit out of that market, then the suite should lose its status completely, and all the privileges that come with it.

The proposed Vancouver bylaw is already flexible — and that’s fair. But let’s not make it so flexible that it reorganizes the legal, residential foundation of entire neighbourhoods simply to help one giant multinational to attract a few more customers.

Lis Pimentel is the chair of Canada’s Fairbnb.ca coalition for fair regulations for short-term rentals, based in Toronto. Ulrike Rodrigues of Homes not Hotels, is a Vancouver supporter of the coalition.