Suppose you spent a week throwing rocks through your neighbours’ windows, and then you spent the following week selling everyone burglar alarms and vandalism insurance. Once they knew what you were up to, nobody would pat you on the back for saving the neighbourhood.

Yet a pat on the back is exactly what Airbnb is hoping to get from politicians in Vancouver and Toronto in the next few weeks. Even though the multinational company is a huge contributor to both cities’ housing crises, Airbnb now calls itself “an economic lifeline for the middle class” and a housing market solution to everyone who will listen.

This month, the cities of Vancouver and Toronto will send their draft short-term rental bylaws to their city councils for approval. Vancouver has already held public hearings on its own proposed bylaw.

Not coincidentally, both cities are suffering from severe housing crises. In Vancouver, the CMHC expects that vacancy rates might rise to 1.1 per cent by 2019, but until then, rates well below 1 per cent are more routine. Toronto’s vacancy rate is a little higher thanks to a large number of condo rentals, but it’s still brutally tight.

In the preliminary hearings in Vancouver, Airbnb and its hosts pushed the idea that selling rooms on a short-term basis is a “lifeline” for those who can’t afford high-priced mortgages on one or more homes that they own. It’s a line they’ve used in other cities before. No one admitted that prices are high and lifelines are needed because investors are hoarding units zoned, approved and built for long-term residents and selling them as “ghost hotels” instead.

Airbnb is telling every legislator it can that the majority of Airbnb “hosts” are individuals renting out their principal residence while they’re on vacation, or “homesharers” renting out a spare room. And that’s true. But this carefully-chosen stat sidesteps the real picture.

In Toronto, while only 16 per cent of Airbnb hosts rent out more than one unit, those 16 per cent control 38 per cent of Airbnb’s total unit inventory. Over half of Airbnb’s local revenue comes from those ghost hotel operators. And to give you a sense of the scale of these “ghost hotels” that take homes off the market, the largest Toronto operator has more than 60 listings on the platform.

This is the pattern around the world. “Homesharing” was once a cute, “authentic” way to set up an occasional B & B in your spare room. Now, measured by room-nights sold, Airbnb is the largest hotel operator in dozens of cities around the globe. Airbnb attacks pro-housing coalitions like Fairbnb.ca for accepting modest financial support from hotel unions (to date, we haven’t got one dime from an actual hotelier). But Airbnb itself is a multinational that has deployed vast sums of money in paid lobbyists in Toronto in the last month alone.

That’s why the Fairbnb.ca coalition – and the bylaws and ordinances in so many global cities – focuses efforts on allowing short-term rentals only for principal residences.

That’s why Fairbnb.ca is pushing hard to make sure government ID is needed to register a principal residence for short-term rental – just as Airbnb requires government ID for its own guests before they’re allowed to rent units in the Neptune towers in Toronto under an agreement announced last month. And that’s why Fairbnb.ca wants condo boards to be able to exclude entire towers from short-term rental licensing if they choose to, since that’s where so many of the ghost hotel and investor units are taking out housing supply in both cities right now.

Housing long-term residents is the most basic point of having a city at all. Despite the claim that Airbnb can help individuals solve the housing crisis it helped to create, mayors and councilors in both Metro Vancouver and Toronto have so far been open-minded on regulations to protect our housing supply. Most support reasonable regulation, just as we do. But it’s telling that many councillors on both the political left and right have asked us why Airbnb hasn’t been banned completely already, given current laws.

They’re asking that question because existing laws, if enforced, would put hundreds of ghost hotel units out of business already. In public hearings on the proposed Vancouver bylaw, many Airbnb hosts insisted that the rules were unfair because they had already bought secondary suites, second homes or condos solely to rent them on Airbnb or other platforms.

They insisted the units weren’t lost to the rental market because they had no interest in renting them to long-term tenants in the first place. Remember, these were units zoned for residential use – and in a tough housing market, we’re supposed to believe changing laws to accommodate this is “fair” or a “lifeline” because it helps these hosts get a faster return on their risky investment.

This is why you’re going to start hearing Airbnb talk about how it’s a “lifeline” as the debate ramps up in the coming weeks – to build sympathy for those who can afford to take a mortgage risk on big home, or a second or third home, when our sympathy should be for those who can’t even afford to rent their first home because of a shortage of rental supply.

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If you listen carefully, that ambulance-chasing sound you hear is the sound of a rock going through your housing market’s window. And when the doorbell rings, just remember who threw that rock before you buy that “lifeline” insurance policy.

Thorben Wieditz is a researcher with Unite Here Local 75, which represents hotel workers in the Greater Toronto Area, and a member of the Fairbnb.ca coalition.