Columnists
No vacancy
The summer months are coming, and seeking rental housing in Prince Edward County is fast becoming a gloomy pastime. Long-term rentals are a rare sight on the frequently used classifieds website Kijiji, with most ads for housing offering monthly rentals only between November and May.
Move over to Airbnb, a website that facilitates the creation and marketing of vacation rentals, and you’ll see a different story. Despite the County’s popularity, it’s not difficult this early in the season to find a weekend or week-long house, apartment or even room for rent.
Landlords, it seems, have caught on to the fact that despite the County’s low vacancy rate, the rental market is nowhere near as lucrative as the tourism market. Owners can make as much, if not more, from living spaces as vacation properties in the six warmer months than as rental properties year-round.
The upside to this is that the properties are being filled with tourists, and those tourists are bringing cash into the County. But in a community starving for affordable housing, this success has consequences for others.
Without a doubt, the County relies on tourism as a major part of the economy. This is a reality. And there is no reason to discourage those tourists. But for residents who don’t own property, a combination of the County’s skyrocketing real estate market and tougher CMHC guidelines for down payments on mortgages mean renting is the only option, and the high season for tourists is the high season for work.
When that stock of workers is pushed out of the County and into neighbouring Belleville and Trenton, it causes erosion. Some part of the community that is too disconnected to contribute, too mired in commuting or worse—attracted by job offers that are closer to home and choose to leave the County altogether.
The County is working to remedy some of this by improving housing stock. New bylaws allow residents to apply for subsidies and build secondary suites, while developers may be able to apply for provincial funding incentives if they offer affordable rental housing in new buildings.
But there is no bylaw limiting the use of those properties, and after they’re built, there’s little to stop landlords from becoming innkeepers, especially if that’s more likely to pay the bills.
And yet, being young and working in the County can be a precarious thing, especially without family owning property. Almost a quarter of people working in the County are commuting from other places. Conversely, less than half of County residents work here.
This comes at a cost to the community. Members of the public sitting on volunteer boards that guide the County’s direction must be residents. If the youth with energy and new ideas to contribute no longer live here, their contributions will go elsewhere as well. Ties to the community can become tenuous.
There’s no easy solution to this. We can’t vilify tourists who fuel the County’s economy. Nor can we blame homeowners for making more fiscally responsible decisions. But in the meantime, anyone looking to make a home in the County may eventually be pushed out by those no vacancy signs, and it’s our loss.
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