Weston is having an important conversation about short-term rentals such as Airbnb and Vrbo. Before we make that decision, I hope we ask a bigger question: What do we want Weston to be twenty years from now?
Tourism matters to Weston. Our visitors support our shops, restaurants, wineries, attractions, events, and small businesses. We want people to come here. We want them to stay overnight. We want them to fall in love with our town.
But the very things visitors love about Weston exist because people actually live here.
We are a small town with a limited number of houses. When an ordinary residential home is purchased and converted into a full-time, unhosted short-term rental, it doesn’t create another house. It changes who that house serves. Instead of housing a family, teacher, employee, retiree, or future Weston resident, it becomes lodging for a revolving population of visitors.
That deserves serious consideration.
This isn’t simply hypothetical. Research in the United States and Europe has found measurable
relationships between increased short-term-rental activity and higher housing costs, while Statistics
Canada has documented just how concentrated short-term rentals can become in tourism communities.
The national Canadian figure was less than 1% of housing, yet potentially long-term dwellings being used as short-term rentals represented 15% in Canmore, 16.4% in Mont-Tremblant, and 35% in Whistler.
Those aren’t predictions about what will happen in Weston. They’re warnings about what can happen when a tourism community doesn’t carefully protect its housing supply.
And Weston already has the beginnings of a sensible alternative.
Our existing Bed & Breakfast ordinance regulates overnight lodging through Special Use Exceptions and includes requirements concerning resident operators, parking, licensing, inspections, safety, guest rooms, and neighborhood impacts.
Why not modernize that system?
Keep the requirement that someone actually lives on the property. Make serving breakfast optional. Allow those approved businesses to advertise through Airbnb, Vrbo, and similar platforms. Consider concentrating new hosted lodging near our downtown tourism district, where overnight guests can walk to
Weston’s restaurants, coffee shops, stores, and attractions.
That gives residents an opportunity to benefit from tourism without giving investors an unrestricted opportunity to turn our residential neighborhoods into collections of vacation rentals.
This doesn’t have to be an argument between being “for” or “against” Airbnb.
We can be for tourism and for housing.
We can welcome visitors while protecting neighborhoods.
We can encourage entrepreneurship while protecting opportunities for people who want to make Weston
their permanent home.
And we can proceed cautiously, collect local data, and reconsider the policy later if the safeguards prove unnecessary. It is much easier to loosen sensible restrictions in the future than to rebuild a year-round housing supply after homes have been converted to profitable vacation rentals.
Weston is valuable because of its history and beauty, certainly.
But buildings don’t make a community.
People do.
As we decide how to accommodate the people who want to visit Weston, I hope we are equally committed to protecting a place for the people who want to live here.
