Green MSP calls for limits on short term letting

[SKII]

Green MSP Andy Wightman calls for controls on holiday homes

Housing crisis building up. Edinburgh population projected to be bigger than Glasgow within the decade. Housing costs increasingly beyond the reach of our youngsters. Instances of anti-social behaviour.
Is he right?

 

[aggie]

Green MSP Andy Wightman calls for controls on holiday homes

Housing crisis building up. Edinburgh population projected to be bigger than Glasgow within the decade. Housing costs increasingly beyond the reach of our youngsters. Instances of anti-social behaviour.
Is he right?

In my opinion, yes, 100%. I have lived in Abbeyhill/top of Easter Road in two stints (7 and 8 yrs) since 1998, and the difference is stark. Furthermore, the rapidity of change over the latter 8 years has been startling. It's about this time of year that my street will begin to reverberate to the daily music of trolley suitcases; and my rent will creep up again as it does at the end of every 12-month (maximum) lease.

 

[Chris G Whyte]

To be honest...

I don't really get what he's asking for, what problem he's trying to solve, or if there's even a problem to be solved at all. The article is painfully short on actual detail about why a change to planning permission rules would solve some of the listed problems.

 

[SKII]

In my opinion, yes, 100%. I have lived in Abbeyhill/top of Easter Road in two stints (7 and 8 yrs) since 1998, and the difference is stark. Furthermore, the rapidity of change over the latter 8 years has been startling. It's about this time of year that my street will begin to reverberate to the daily music of trolley suitcases; and my rent will creep up again as it does at the end of every 12-month (maximum) lease.

I agree, too, @aggie.
Abbeyhill residents association are working with him on this. The Colonies and the area as a whole are significantly affected by the airbnb business especially. I know of a number of properties in the area owned by overseas absent landlords who have no concern for who comes and goes. The house next door to us is owned by a wealthy Italian 30 something who has similar properties in Athens, London, Paris...since he bought it we don't know who is next door from one day to the next. And the percentage of these situations in the street has crept up significantly in the last 5 years. Other neighbours have bought up properties for the sole purpose of letting out the 2nd. That's not as bad, as they live in the street too and monitor things but it's still a property removed from an already overstretched housing stock. And it's happening extensively.
The rate of change is exponential. The community is constantly in upheaval. I have four established neighbours all now had enough and selling up, the final straw being the council allowing the building of a 9 storey block next to Meadowbank retail park and okaying further developments of this nature on the site of Abbeyhill Business Park. More over priced flats for transient use.

Edinburgh is coping with the bulk of Scotland's growing population. Its also the number one tartan theme park for tourists. The rate of change in many of its communities is not in the best interests of those communities. And nobody seems to have the inclination or capacity to do anything to address it.

 

[Jack]

Buy to let and any of those sites where you can rent for short periods are a nightmare in tenements. It makes it virtually impossible to to get common repairs done. There's also an issue, maybe made worse with short lets, is the amount of large items of junk that regularly appears beside the bins.

A To Let sign also generally means a loud house warming party not long after it comes down!

 

[aggie]

I agree, too, @aggie.
Abbeyhill residents association are working with him on this. The Colonies and the area as a whole are significantly affected by the airbnb business especially. I know of a number of properties in the area owned by overseas absent landlords who have no concern for who comes and goes. The house next door to us is owned by a wealthy Italian 30 something who has similar properties in Athens, London, Paris...since he bought it we don't know who is next door from one day to the next. And the percentage of these situations in the street has crept up significantly in the last 5 years. Other neighbours have bought up properties for the sole purpose of letting out the 2nd. That's not as bad, as they live in the street too and monitor things but it's still a property removed from an already overstretched housing stock. And it's happening extensively.
The rate of change is exponential. The community is constantly in upheaval. I have four established neighbours all now had enough and selling up, the final straw being the council allowing the building of a 9 storey block next to Meadowbank retail park and okaying further developments of this nature on the site of Abbeyhill Business Park. More over priced flats for transient use.

Edinburgh is coping with the bulk of Scotland's growing population. Its also the number one tartan theme park for tourists. The rate of change in many of its communities is not in the best interests of those communities. And nobody seems to have the inclination or capacity to do anything to address it.

I didn't know there was a residents' association, I must look into joining that.

IMO, Airbnb needs dealing with. The original ethos was fine, almost admirable in fact - people with spare rooms putting up foreign visitors for a bit of extra cash. The cultural interface value is self-evident. However, they are now becoming largely nothing more than completely unsupervised B&B's, without the second B.

A regular occurrence for me now is the following: an Airbnb near me rents out to stag and hen parties virtually every weekend. They apparently have one key between them, and so very often you have the ones who have stayed out later standing in the street at 4am, bellowing at an upstairs window, buzzing the buzzer relentlessly, and shouting into phones, obviously trying to wake up the ones who came home early with the key and have clearly passed out. I'm told the owner is a retired couple who live in the South of France. Something about that just strikes me as off.

 

[Chris G Whyte]

Sorry, folks, but I’m still a bit lost.

I just don’t understand what Wightman thinks this amendment is going to do about the problems you’ve listed. It just seems like prescribing paracetamol to someone with malignant lung cancer.

It means well, but won’t do a blind bit of good.

 

[Smurf]

I agree, too, @aggie.
Abbeyhill residents association are working with him on this. The Colonies and the area as a whole are significantly affected by the airbnb business especially. I know of a number of properties in the area owned by overseas absent landlords who have no concern for who comes and goes. The house next door to us is owned by a wealthy Italian 30 something who has similar properties in Athens, London, Paris...since he bought it we don't know who is next door from one day to the next. And the percentage of these situations in the street has crept up significantly in the last 5 years. Other neighbours have bought up properties for the sole purpose of letting out the 2nd. That's not as bad, as they live in the street too and monitor things but it's still a property removed from an already overstretched housing stock. And it's happening extensively.
The rate of change is exponential. The community is constantly in upheaval. I have four established neighbours all now had enough and selling up, the final straw being the council allowing the building of a 9 storey block next to Meadowbank retail park and okaying further developments of this nature on the site of Abbeyhill Business Park. More over priced flats for transient use.

Edinburgh is coping with the bulk of Scotland's growing population. Its also the number one tartan theme park for tourists. The rate of change in many of its communities is not in the best interests of those communities. And nobody seems to have the inclination or capacity to do anything to address it.

Last sentence says it all for me. Particularly this SNP/Labour council....

 

[Chris G Whyte]

Last sentence says it all for me. Particularly this SNP/Labour council....

The thing is, it's quite difficult to do a great deal if you're a council at the moment; particularly in the main towns and cities.

A great many councils are utterly hamstrung by Labour's PFI excesses, something they'll be paying for decades to come, and most of the Scottish government's money is going into mitigating the de-investment of the Conservative government at Westminster (around a 10% drop in real-terms spending). That, to me, suggests that councils would be unlikely to deny the planning Wightman's talking about, because the type of people who use short-term lets are those who are economically beneficial to the local area. They arrive with pockets full of money, and cash-strapped councils are happy to see some of it end up in their coffers.

I get that it's having a detrimental effect on local communities, particularly those at the lower end of the income scale who are seeing bog standard rent increases, but I'm not sure many councils will choose to make themselves poorer when they have schools to keep open.

As usual, your mileage may vary.

 

[SKII]

The thing is, it's quite difficult to do a great deal if you're a council at the moment; particularly in the main towns and cities.

A great many councils are utterly hamstrung by Labour's PFI excesses, something they'll be paying for decades to come, and most of the Scottish government's money is going into mitigating the de-investment of the Conservative government at Westminster (around a 10% drop in real-terms spending). That, to me, suggests that councils would be unlikely to deny the planning Wightman's talking about, because the type of people who use short-term lets are those who are economically beneficial to the local area. They arrive with pockets full of money, and cash-strapped councils are happy to see some of it end up in their coffers.

I get that it's having a detrimental effect on local communities, particularly those at the lower end of the income scale who are seeing bog standard rent increases, but I'm not sure many councils will choose to make themselves poorer when they have schools to keep open.

As usual, your mileage may vary.

What's an "area at the lower end of the income scale"? I know you're abroad but the areas we're talking about now have £400,000 flats. Brunswick Road, 5 mins walk from ER. Colonies in Abbeyhill now going for over £350,000. Prices being pushed up by unmanaged population growth creating demand. Lack of control of development, short term letting (income that is tax free for those letting out the homes up to a fairly high limit) all accelerating the process.
It can't continue to go unregulated. Or we face the communities in a 2 mile radius of the city being full of students, transient workers, weekend stag party goers and not much more. Meanwhile, the knock on effect will be those selling their homes to escape/cash in moving further out to get cheaper housing...but pushing those prices up in the process and knocking on the housing problems to the wider communities.

 

[Hammi]

120 000 people booked in with air bnb during the festival apparently.

That's a lot of space.

 

[SKII]

120 000 people booked in with air bnb during the festival apparently.

That's a lot of space.

Edinburgh is used to, and always dealt with, this pattern of behaviour in August. The problem is, as @aggie rightly alludes, that this is pretty much round the calendar now. More cabin trollies on the streets of the capital on a Friday night than in Heathrow airport...

 

[Chris G Whyte]

What's an "area at the lower end of the income scale"? I know you're abroad but the areas we're talking about now have £400,000 flats. Brunswick Road, 5 mins walk from ER. Colonies in Abbeyhill now going for over £350,000. Prices being pushed up by unmanaged population growth creating demand. Lack of control of development, short term letting (income that is tax free for those letting out the homes up to a fairly high limit) all accelerating the process.

It's hard to say for sure, bud.
The reality is that comparing the Scottish or British housing market to the Dutch is a bit like apples and oranges, because the markets are regulated totally differently. Here in the Netherlands, for example, there are rent controls that stop the crooked pocketing of worker's wages (£650 to £700 is the average rent in Scotland), and any property owned after the first is considered wealth and, therefore, taxed.

Additionally, there are regulations that stop short-term lets in certain residential areas. Maastricht, as a prime example, doesn't allow short-term lets in its main residential areas at all; and for some of the reasons we've listed.

The problem I have with what Wightman's suggesting isn't that I don't think regulation is the solution, just that this regulation isn't. Giving councils the opportunity to disagree is going to meet with, in my view, disappointment for increasingly ripped-off rental tenants.

It can't continue to go unregulated. Or we face the communities in a 2 mile radius of the city being full of students, transient workers, weekend stag party goers and not much more. Meanwhile, the knock on effect will be those selling their homes to escape/cash in moving further out to get cheaper housing...but pushing those prices up in the process and knocking on the housing problems to the wider communities.

There are already parts of central Edinburgh that are more campuses than they are residential areas. It's fucking sad.

But I think the solution is probably much wider ranging than we're talking about here. For example, I can't understand why major population centres aren't looking into rent controls (which you can't really do in England), better established regulation for short-term lets, and the development of micro-housing.

I suppose it depends on what problem you're trying to solve.

 

[gun ainm]

from what i understand Andy Wightman is not trying to solve the multitude of problems associated with short term lets he is looking to provide local authorities with a tool which they can use if they see it as an issue. I think its Norway that has a separate planning requirements for holiday homes/short term lets and domestic housing. Result is that communities are protected. i think his proposal is a good one and would benefit us all whether you live in the centre of Embra or the Hebrides.