Overstaying Power

Airbnb is crowding our housing markets — and it’s refusing to budge.

- Max Fawcett

AFTER LIVING in Vancouver for a year, Becca Young wanted to move back to Toronto with her husband, two-year-old son, and two cats. They looked for the right place for a couple of months and finally found it in a two-building condo complex near the waterfront. It was big enough for all of them, Young and her husband could walk to work, and there was a daycare nearby.

The couple moved in April 2018, and the trouble started soon after. As it turned out, they had chosen a complex that, according to the Toronto Star, had the most Airbnb listings of any building in the entire city — 300. The couple quickly had to contend with the consequences. Those ranged from almost weekly fire alarm pulls and elevator interruptions to loud parties and a wide variety of messes in the building’s common areas. There was even blood spatter in the lobby that stayed up for three days. “I always say that, when I close the door behind me, I love my building,” Young says. “But, between the front door and my apartment door, it’s pretty frigging awful.”

It got worse. In December, there was a shooting inside an Airbnb unit on a different floor, something that put Young and her husband on edge for weeks. “I kept having images of a bullet going through my son’s wall. He sleeps right next to the wall of the party unit.” A few months later, Young was verbally threatened by somebody after she tried to intervene with a man from the Airbnb unit next door who’d been shouting at a woman in the hallway. She and her husband have considered moving from the building, but the city’s increasingly hostile rental market made that idea a nonstarter. In April, they renewed their lease for another year.