By John Francis
Northern Bruce Peninsula’s questionnaire about Short-Term Accommodations (STAs) is on the municipal website (www.northbrucepeninsula.ca) ready to be filled out.
The survey is focused on measuring the trade-off between inconvenience/annoyance (loud parties, too many parked cars) on the one hand and economic benefit (stupendous rental income) on the other.
But this perspective entirely misses the collateral economic damage caused by STAs.
Our hotel/motel/resort sector is being squeezed at both ends by STAs. How? At one end, STAs undercut the commercial sector on price, which reduces both occupancy rates and prices. At the other end, STAs make it hard for hotels and motels to get staff.
What? STAs make it hard to get staff?
Yep.
If you are a young person looking to make a life on the Bruce Peninsula, you need a place to live. If you are scrabbling together an income of barely $20,000 a year, what is available to you? You probably need a car to get to work, so there isn’t a whole lot left over for food, let alone rent.
How much can you offer to a landlord? The thumbnail calculation says that you should spend 1/3 of your income on rent. That gives you $500 or $600 a month.
A landlord has a decision to make. Do I rent to local folk at $600 a month, or do I put it on AirBnB for $200 a night?
A cottage owner has a similar decision. Do I invite the grandkids to stay at the cottage or rent it for $300 a night?
The answers to these questions turn out to be no-brainers. There are a lot of grandkids spending the summer at home in the city. And there are very few long-term rentals available, let alone vacant or affordable. In the rental market, local workers can’t compete with Toronto money.
This translates to a lot fewer people coming to the peninsula to work. You can see the results wherever you look. Most stores close at 6:00PM; restaurants operate on reduced hours; Peacocks Food Town closes at 8:00PM; Tobermory Harbour is short three staff; contractors have a hard time finding carpenters and labourers; Golden Dawn Nursing Home is in desperate need of caregivers (see letter below) and, as noted above, hotels, motels and resorts have a hard time finding cleaning staff and night clerks.
Some of the larger peninsula tourism operations have bought properties to use as staff housing, but this is beyond the financial capacity of most of the smaller businesses.
Rent-geared-to-income housing — what little there is of it — is helpful for those who have established themselves in the community and can jump through the requisite hoops. But it’s no help at all to folk from away who are looking for a place to live and work.
A generation ago there were lots of rental rooms and cabins available for summer workers. Those rooms and cabins were a landing pad for people who wanted to move here. Ask anybody who moved here in the 70s or 80s where they stayed when they first arrived.
But those days are gone. Can you see any way that this situation might improve? I sure can’t. Local workers will never have as much money as tourists from the cities so there’s no incentive to build a place for local workers to live.
Julie Wardrop suggests in her letter (below) that we need to make it much easier for people to move here to work. She is absolutely right.
Some excellent facilities have been created for seniors — the Hayes facility in Lion’s Head, the apartments at Golden Dawn and the Bradley Davis Apartments in Tobermory.
Could something like them be created on the peninsula for temporary and seasonal workers? Because if nothing is done, the worker shortage will get worse. Imagine losing critical services — day cares and Golden Dawn are two that leap to mind — to labour shortages. Imagine the dwindling numbers at our schools if young families can’t afford to move here.
There seem to be two possible solutions here: either limit the use of residential buildings as Short-Term Accommodations or build public housing. I suspect we will need to do both.
There were workers’ hostels all over Canada as recently as a generation ago. There are tens of thousands of units of public housing in the Greater Toronto Area. And of course there is the tradition of “Council Flats” in Britain and their equivalents throughout Europe. That’s how societies make sure their work force has a place to live.
That’s probably the best solution here on the peninsula. But who will build them and whose taxes will pay for them?
These are questions we had best start asking.
