Looking for digs to rent?

Fuhgeddaboudit. This town doesn’t want ya.

As I write this there are six (seriously, just six) rentals listed with realtors in the Old Town. The average rent being asked is $3,000 a month.

In Virgil, four places are open and the average there is $3,700. St. Davids has six available, again averaging three grand. (However, a woman willing to move into her basement will rent you a bedroom upstairs for $900, or two for $1,600. And you get a parking spot.)

By the way, three grand a month in rent requires a pre-tax income of about $108,000. Compare this to the average of $2,400 for a one-bedder in the GTA and just over $3,000 for a larger, two-bedroom unit downtown.

Of course, you can also pay $600 to stay in a short-term rental room or cottage in NOTL. But that would buy you just one night.

So the question is simple. If you own a property here and are willing to rent it out, do you choose the stable, long-term tenant working at the Stagecoach willing to pay you a few thousand, or the nice people from Ohio and Pennsylvania who happily hand over $12,000 for staying there 20 days a month?

This is why there are virtually no rentals in NOTL. Property owners can make boodles more money commercializing residences and turning them into short-term rentals.

NOTL is a sweet spot for this. The entrepreneurs pay lower residential taxes (not commercial). Unlike most places in the rest of North America we allow unhosted “ghost” rentals. And local politicians have just kicked the can down the road again, voting to defer changes to the rules that got us here.

“People call me and say that I need to support short-term rentals because they live in New Jersey and bought a house here,” says Maria Mavridis.

“People send me emails say we’re planning in retiring in town so we bought a house and now we need to short-term rental it. Otherwise we can’t afford it, and you can’t do this to me.”

“There are 26 short-term rentals on King Street alone. All my real estate friends are pitching homes as great Airbnb properties but, oh my God, we need families in this town.”

Mavridis is a NOTL councillor. Last week she sat with her colleagues and listened once again to people argue about the issue. It’s been years now. Despite that debate — and all the evidence of how other communities have handled vacation rentals (which jack up real estate values, blot out tenants and hollow our streets) — town staff has been tasked with preparing yet another report.

That’s due in the spring. Maybe. More consultations, debate, yakking and self-interest will take place first.

It’s no secret the pro-Airbnb, vacay rental lobby in NOTL is a powerful one. Hundreds of residential properties in prime locations have been sucked into that profit machine, feeding off a tourist economy.

But there are costs. The very authenticity of a heritage destination — which visitors come to absorb — is frayed when every second house is a little hotel. The community hollows out. Families vanish. Schools close. Over time, dry cleaners and hardware stores become souvenir shoppes and gelato palaces.

Surely there are enough hotels in this little place to bed most of Toledo and Toronto. Parliament Oak is being built. Q124 wants to expand. Hummel’s 81-bedder grows closer. The Garrison Village Terminal 4 hotel is coming, with its 42-unit tourist motel wing.

And then we have the Prince of Wales, Harbour House, Queen’s Landing, Pillar & Post, Best Western, Shaw Club plus the Oban, Charles, Moffat and a clutch of other inns.

“My end goal,” says Mavridis, “is to ensure we don’t have homes sitting in neighbourhoods like the one down the street from me that’s empty eight months of the year. They’re running a commercial business in a residential area. It shouldn’t be there.”

“We need neighbourhoods. Otherwise we’re just a tourist town. Yes, the guy owning the rental house across the street may be making $10,000 a month, but wouldn’t you love to have a family living there?”

You bet.