Submitted by headgasketidiot t3_120mve1 in vermont
I normally quite like /u/bravestatevt, but I have some big issues with this one, mostly with their interpretation and framing, though I do have one of fact.
The piece starts with 2 stories; one about someone who once lived on a wonderful little street that lost their house to Airbnb, and the other of a small town conflict Airbnb is causing. I think those were nicely reported, but I will come back to this later.
Here's where they get to the stats:
>We can’t assume these results would be consistent across the whole state. But statewide data suggests most short-term rental operators are small-scale, rather than people with Airbnb empires. According to Transparent, a vacation rental data company, 93% of short-term rental owners in Vermont operated just one or two listings in January 2023. On the flip side, the other 7% of owners with more than two listings accounted for almost half of all listings in the state.
>So, there’s a small number of owners who have an outsized impact on Vermont’s short-term rental landscape. And, therefore, an outsized impact on the narrative about short-term rental owners.
This is a bizarre framing. Let me reframe it: 50% of STRs are owned by just 7% of owners, which gives them an outsized impact not just on the narrative about short-term rental owners, which isn't really what we care about, but on the actual economics of STRs and therefore on the impact of STRs on housing, whatever it may be.
They go on to talk about how people need the STRs to afford where they live:
>The survey found that short-term rentals are helping many residents afford to live there.
>"One of the most interesting questions in the survey was the question of 'what do you do with the income?'" Emily says.
>Forty-two percent of respondents said they use the income to supplement the cost of living in Lamoille County. Thirty-nine percent said they use the income for insurance, medical costs or automotive costs.
>“I really had no idea that this many people were using short term rentals to be able to afford to live in the community,” Emily Rosenbaum says. “And I thought it was a really important thing, because that is not the narrative we hear.”
Let me reframe this, with the opening stories of the episode in mind. Our economic situation is such that middle class folks have turned to mining our communities to stay afloat. This isn't a story about how Airbnb is providing an important lifeline for people; it's one of decades of policy failure that has resulted in people desperate to hold on carving up their own communities, and the conflict that causes, which they reported on so nicely at the beginning. That people are willing to hold on to that lifeline despite how obviously negatively it affects their friends actually kinda sucks, especially when you consider that that lifeline only accounts for 50% of Airbnbs. The other 50% are owned by large companies. That's a lot of overhead for a very small lifeline.
The piece goes on to interview Julie Marks, the founder of the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance. I won't bother with that one.
Then, they interview Leslie Black-Plumeau with the Vermont Housing Finance Agency:
>Remember, Vermont has around 10,000 short-term rentals right now that take up an entire home. But Leslie’s focused on a different number. The estimate that Vermont needs to add 30 to 40,000 more year-round homes to make up for years of underbuilding, and to keep up with growing demand of people who want to live here. [emphasis added]
That bolded piece contains an implied factual claim, and VPR should have provided context if not an outright fact check. I think this is very important because it has become an obviously accepted truth that people are moving here in droves, and while that is kinda true on the scale of previous net migration, it is absolutely not true on the kinds of scales people normally talk about population.In other words, Vermont saw an "explosion" of migration in 2020, but that's only when compared to our usual population growth, which is basically flat and has been for decades. Here's some numbers from the census.
Vermont's population has grown just 5.6% since 2000. From the census, the population is now 645,570. In 2000, it was 609,618.
(645,570 - 609,618) / 645,570 = 5.6%
Compare that to the US's rate of 15%.
Our population growth in the last year, according to the census, is less than 100 people.That big "spike" in migration that we collectively are still freaking out about, which happened at the beginning of the pandemic, is a few thousand people, or .7% of the population. In other words, it was a one-time aberration in an otherwise basically flat line, which we quickly returned to.
More importantly, I think this part of the piece really buries the lede. According to that block quote, there are 10k short term rentals, and we need 30-40k more houses "to make up for years of underbuilding."
Read that another way, and it kinda sounds like SFH STRs might account for 1/3-1/4 of our missing housing. That's like a lot. Let's contextualize that with another huge political crisis. 25% of our emissions in the US comes from electricity generation. Look at how much effort and political will people are spending on changing it over to renewables -- and rightly so. If one single factor might account for 25% of our housing crisis, it is a huge deal.
There's also that other claim, which again they let go by without context. We're 30-40k short due to "underbuilding." That's an interpretation, not a fact. Let me provide an alternative interpretation of the shortage, which I think is a good counterbalance:
20% of housing is second homes (17%) and vacation rentals (3%). Those homes are functionally kept outside the housing pool. That means, theoretically, we could have 25% more housing inventory tomorrow if we just take the empty vacation homes and Airbnbs. Plus, if we accept that 20% of our housing will remain functionally outside the pool, and the only way is to build our way out of it, does that mean we're going to have to build 25% more housing than we need to build otherwise as vacation rentals and second homes continue to get snatched up? That seems like a problem.
Vermont has 331,106 homes. If 20% are vacation homes and STRs, that means there's 66,221 homes in that 20% -- well over the 30-40k we're short. I understand this assumes that houses are fungible, and not all these houses are in the right places etc., but I think that simple analysis casts some doubt on the interpretation and assumption that the shortage is due to "underbuilding." Those numbers all really jumped out to me as the obvious interpretation, and if it's wrong, I think they missed an opportunity to explain why that is.
edit: typos
Ecstatic-Actuary9871 t1_jdi2n1l wrote
Excellent response, thank you!