The city says its short-term rental rules are about protecting Toronto’s housing supply and maintaining the stability of its beloved residential neighbourhoods — even the ones located in highrises.Landlords say the rules restrict their property rights and income.The two sides waited a year to put their cases before the province’s Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT). Its adjudicator Scott Tousaw will decide whether the bylaw — originally supposed to take effect in June 2018 — ever goes into play. It’s not clear when he will deliver a decision but it will be after an Oct. 15 hearing date in which description arguments will be presented by lawyers representing the city, the landlords, and the Fairbnb coalition — a group comprised of tenant advocates, hotel industry representatives, neighbourhood groups, residents and academics.Here are some of the take-aways from the first eight days of hearings that took place in August and early September after a year’s delay.Tenants are primary when it comes to secondary suitesMuch of the tribunal was occupied with the bylaw’s restrictions on property owners’ ability to use legal secondary suites as short-term rentals.It turns out Toronto has 2,138 legal secondary units. Built between 2002 and 2018, those are the suites for which the city has building permits on file.When the Star questioned that number directly with the city, it found the legal units are dwarfed by the Toronto’s estimate of another 70,000 to 100,000 secondary suites built prior to amalgamation. Some of those complied with the building and fire codes of the time and are considered legal but the city has “no consolidated records” of those. Others, built without permits, are considered illegal. Toronto has no record at all of those. The city offered no clear explanation of how it intends to stop homeowners from renting illegal secondary suites, only that it doesn’t want to be too ...
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