Your City Hall just okayed more short-term rentals

Good morning, Vancouver. Beautiful out here. Complicated in here. That's the coast.

City Hall had a Special Council meeting on April 21st, and it was a short one. The big takeaway for many of us trying to find a long-term place to live? A new short-term rental business license was unanimously approved for a unit at 1801-1788 Columbia Street. Councillors B. Montague, L. Zhou, and S. Orr all voted in favour. Councillor R. Bligh was absent, so it sailed through.

It’s just one unit, of course, but it's another apartment in a city desperate for housing that will now be part of the short-term market. We've seen a lot of these kinds of applications come through. Meanwhile, we're still seeing permits issued for new multiplexes, like the one for a three-storey, four-unit building at 4008 Dunbar Street, valued at just under $1.9 million, issued on April 24th. It feels like we're building density, but then some of that density just… disappears from the long-term rental pool. It’s a bit of a *dogma*— a puzzling situation.

What does this mean for us? Well, keep an eye on how many more of these short-term rental approvals quietly accumulate. Each one chips away at our housing stock, one unit at a time.

Kenji Nakashima, MiTL Sports Desk, Vancouver.

You know, the early light on the mountains is something else. If you're up anyway, the crew at mornings.live is already talking about it.