Revelstoke city abandons short-term rentals bylaw, proposes new plan to limit rentals to specific neighborhoods

Revelstoke will be looking to limit short-term rentals to neighbourhoods with existing tourist downtown, near RMR, and Mackenzie Village, as it starts anew developing a new short-term rentals plan.

This new approach replaces the previous short-term rentals plan discussed in the past few months, which has now been abandoned.

At the December 9, 2021 meeting of the City of Revelstoke’s Committee of the Whole, members endorsed a staff-recommended option that plans to limit short-term rentals to specific Revelstoke neighborhoods.

A staff report mentions downtown, Revelstoke Mountain Resort and Mackenzie Village. The plan is to develop a new plan based on an outline presented in a report to the committee.

Two other staff options were left behind.

The first was to continue with the short-term rentals bylaw with improvements based on feedback. That means the bylaw that has been up for feedback in the past few months has failed and has been set aside, including commitments to many specifics.

The other abandoned option was to shelve the project for a while until the B.C. government updates its short-term rentals policies, possibly in 2022.

The committee opted to move ahead with the neighbourhood-specific option. Or Option 3.

The wording of the staff recommendation endorsed by the committee reads:

Proceed to review feasibility of draft regulations for STR that would be permitted in specific areas of the City that have existing zoning to permit tourist accommodation

The next steps are to develop the plan, prepare a report, identify costs, develop a new policy, and to head back into public engagement, then zoning bylaw amendments. A preliminary report is scheduled for January. By all appearances, the new process seems likely to take at least a few to several months, maybe more.

One councillor opposed

Coun. J. Rhind was the only vote against limiting to specific neighborhoods. She spoke strongly against unequal rules, while others countered that zoning by area is standard.

More details on the preliminary plan

The city staff report contains more detailed bullet points on what they hope to do, so if you’re following along with the short-term rentals issue in Revelstoke, you should follow this link to the Dec. 9 city staff report here. Once there, look for ‘Option 3’ and read to the end.

The preliminary plan will require council approval at some point. The report does say a preliminary report could come in January 2022.

Dec. 9 was a committee meeting, which has less procedural language and more freewheeling discussion making it easier to understand.

You can watch the Dec. 9 committee discussion of the topic cued to the start of the short-term rentals discussion here:

Analysis: Back to the drawing board

After two years of study, reports, plans and meetings, the city’s proposed short-term rentals bylaw has crashed and burned and the city is rebooting the process, starting from scratch with a new plan to limit short-term rentals to certain areas.

Officially, the city has spent $17,532 on the process so far, but that doesn’t include staff time and other resources sapped away from other pressing business.

In one way or another, the city has been trying to get a handle on the short-term rentals issue more or less since Revelstoke Mountain Resort opened, but especially in the past decade since online vacation rental bookings surged.

The city has not met with success in its saga. First, tentative steps were taken to pursue violators in court, but that proved to be costly and mostly fruitless, and was abandoned. Next, the city tried a spot-zoning process that fell apart after city council meetings began resembling Jerry Springer Show tapings as applicants battled it out with neighbours over individual vacation rental applications. That was abandoned. Now, the latest attempt, the basement-suites-only option, has come to an end.

The city plans to try again and run the process again, placing faith in its linear approach in the face of financialization of the housing market and exploding home prices, in part driven in Revelstoke by the city’s ongoing lack of enforcement of its core mandate to regulate use. This has commercialized residential properties, jacking up their value in an already molten Canadian market. The city will close that barn door one day, just you wait.

In the meantime, the look-the-other-way approach presides, the frenzy continues, and more fins are circling, including a new sector of large commercial real estate holding companies snapping up investment property in Canada.

An interesting anecdote from the meeting came from Coun. Tim Palmer, who floated the idea that if the city moved ahead with the plan to limit short-term rentals to downtown and near the resort, it could also explore grandfathering in existing non-permitted vacation rentals that are outside the proposed zones. The idea is based on a municipal legal concept that if ‘existing non-conforming’ land uses are not allowed a way to operate legally, there is a case for grandfathering them in. It was quite the dangle to existing short-term rental owners as we head into an election year. Whether the concept will be incorporated in the plan unclear, but Palmer did go out of his way to get it on the record.

The other wildcard in 2022 is what the province will be doing on the short-term rentals issue. The province has faced pressure from UBCM to establish a provincial framework and rules. However, municipal governments have been pressuring the province to do something about the short-term rentals issue for the better part of a decade, but no provincial silver bullets have been spent so far, so place your faith in government authority taking effective action on the market-driven short-term rentals portfolio where you may.