'Sustainable' short-term rental co-op launches in Toronto in North American first
Downtown Toronto will be the first testing ground in North America for a short-term rental co-operative that hopes to put ‘sharing’ back in the sharing economy.
Fairbnb Co-op — launched by Toronto-based organizers who will expand a European site — says it will share revenue with community projects, limit tourism to rentals that don’t displace locals and try to beat big platforms like Airbnb at their own game.
“We will put booking fees and money back into the community where they operate,” Thorben Wieditz of Fairbnb Canada told CTV News Toronto on Thursday.
Fairbnb Co-op site
The site launched on Thursday in Kensington Market — a neighbourhood locals say has been hard hit by the displacement that short-term rental platforms can encourage, with some landlords preferring tourists to residents.
“Pre-pandemic, it was dramatic. There was a point at which I didn’t have any neighbours any more,” Dominique Russell, the co-chair of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust, said.
“I would easily say we’ve been very viscerally ground zero for many of these issues,” Serena Purdy, the chair of Friends of Kensington Market, said.
Both hope the launch of Fairbnb Co-op in Toronto will be an opportunity for travelling customers to enjoy the benefits of short-term rental accommodation, but know their dollars are going in part to support the land trust and the permanent affordable housing it supports in a building the trust recently acquired on Kensington Avenue.
“People who live there will be allowed to stay there and it will be affordable housing in perpetuity,” Russell said.
Wieditz said the site will restrict rentals to only those in primary residences, using spare rooms or while the residents are on holiday.
That’s roughly equivalent to the City of Toronto’s rules — though the city has, in some cases, struggled to enforce those rules.
“We know once we start an ethical alternative customers will move over to the co-operative and we will be playing by the city’s rules, which ironically we helped to set up,” Wieditz said.
Fairbnb Co-op’s site already shows listings for many European cities. Organizers in Toronto hope to get the first listings up in March 2022 — in time for what they hope will be a tourism renaissance.
Their plan is to scale up and do the same across Canada.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Cargo ship had engine maintenance in port before Baltimore bridge collapse, officials say
The cargo ship that lost power and crashed into a bridge in Baltimore underwent 'routine engine maintenance' in port beforehand, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.
A Nigerian woman reviewed some tomato puree online. Now she faces jail
A Nigerian woman who wrote an online review of a can of tomato puree is facing imprisonment after its manufacturer accused her of making a “malicious allegation” that damaged its business.
Far North police 'dispatch' polar bear stalking schoolyard
Police and local hunters in an Ontario Far North First Nation community have “dispatched” a polar that was showing abnormal behaviour and treating the area as a hunting ground.
Donald Trump assails judge and his daughter after gag order in N.Y. hush-money criminal case
Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at the New York judge who put him under a gag order that bars him from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial.
Families shocked after Niagara Falls hotel cancels bookings made year in advance of solar eclipse
After having the foresight to book their Niagara Falls hotel rooms more than a year in advance, several families planning to take in the solar eclipse next month were shocked to find out their reservations had been cancelled.
B.C. rescuers face 'high likelihood' of failure to reunite orphaned orca with pod
The race to reunite an orphaned orca calf that’s stuck in a shallow lagoon with a neighbouring pod has entered its fifth day, and a marine scientist says the clock is ticking.
Video shows police interrupting auto theft in progress outside Toronto home
New video footage obtained by CP24 shows the attempted theft of a vehicle in a North York driveway earlier this month that was ultimately interrupted by police.
Majority of Canadians believe in life after death: Angus Reid survey
A new survey from the Angus Reid Institute has found that a majority of Canadians believe in some form of life after death, a proportion that has held steady for decades.
MyPillow, owned by U.S. election denier Mike Lindell, formally evicted from Minnesota warehouse
A court ordered the eviction Wednesday of MyPillow from a suburban Minneapolis warehouse that it formerly used.