Spoiler Alert: Don’t Hold Your Breath
By John Francis
Six years ago, Wanda and I visited Europe for the first time. It was a pleasure trip, but we did a bit of research too: visiting the world’s premier overtourism hotspot — Venice.
What we found there was a cautionary tale for places like our peninsula. Over the last century or so, Venice has undergone a real estate boom, to the point that the people who work there can’t afford to live there. The population has dwindled by 75% in recent decades and the business community is hollowed out to endless rows of souvenir shops, upscale clothing stores, hotels, trattorias and restaurants.
The people who work in those businesses commute from nearby Mestre, where accommodation is much more affordable. The commute takes seven minutes by train.
But with a population that has fallen below fifty thousand and with well over a hundred thousand visitors arriving every day, Venice has a problem funding municipal services. They have instituted an entry fee for day visitors in an attempt to remedy this. We’ll see how that works…
Fast forward through five years of plague.
In the winter of 2024, we decided to spend a month and a half on a couple of islands off the coast of Georgia. We were surprised to find that overtourism had arrived there too.
Tybee Island is half an hour east of Savannah, Georgia (population 400,000) and four hours from Atlanta (population comparable to the GTA). Tybee Island has a lot of the same problems that we do. The people who come to visit consume a lot of municipal services but they don’t pay any municipal taxes. And the people who work on Tybee Island mostly can’t afford to live there.
Tybee solved the first problem by charging all visitors $5,00 per hour to park. Anywhere. 365 days a year. No exceptions.
The second problem is a bit harder to solve. Tybee Island has 3,000 residential dwelling units and the year-round population is down to barely 3,000 people. But the population swells to 25,000 in the tourist season.
As of 2021, more than half of the island’s residences were being rented out as STAs (they call them STRs), with many more in the process of making the change. Property values had spiked so that only investors could afford to buy houses. After debating the issue for years, Tybee City Council stepped in with a bylaw to regulate the STR sector.
Last June, they voted to further tighten the STR regulations. Henceforth, STR licences are not transferable to new owners of a property, and half the island has been rezoned so that no new STR licences will be granted. The goal is to slowly reduce the number of STRs.
And every STR requires signage. A quote from their bylaw: “If your STR is a one- or two-family unit, it is required to have a sign that is not less than 18 inches by 24 inches and not larger than 24 inches by 24 inches. It should be located on the address side of the property and be legible and visible from the street. It should include a name and an emergency contact phone number.”
This means that neighbours know who to call when STR guests get out of hand.
Tybee Island doesn’t have a Mestre seven minutes away by train, so the working folk have to drive in from a distance. Not surprisingly, there are Help Wanted signs in the windows of many businesses. There aren’t all that many people interested in driving half an hour each way for a low-paying service job.
It will be interesting to watch how things unfold at Tybee, whether prices and rents drop far enough for the workers to move back to the island. Maybe we’ll go back and find out after he-who-shall-not-be-named leaves office.
Here at home, it will be interesting to see if the new federal government will do anything to help create affordable housing in rural areas like ours. I didn’t hear any of the parties proposing programs that would help our municipality with water and sewer systems, but we can always hope.
What I did hear was a lot of talk about reducing income taxes, but I can’t see how that would help — the service industry people the peninsula needs aren’t making enough to pay a lot of taxes. They need support, not tax breaks.
But limiting the spread of STAs might be a good first step.
