BCBusiness

august 2015 BCBusiness 31 renting out their two spare bedrooms -ve years ago through Airbnb, once Senez's children didn't need them. And then, encouraged by more than just the extra cash, they converted their rented basement suite to another Airbnb unit when a long-time tenant gave notice. "It started with us needing help making ends meet. Vancouver is expensive," says Fletcher, a dancer with Ballet BC, where Senez is the rehearsal director. "The amazing thing about Airbnb is, you start out with -nances in mind but it becomes much bigger. It allows you to wel- come people from many other countries and cultures who come into your neighbourhood." Far from getting complaints from their Commercial Drive-area neighbours, say the cou- ple, people are curious and wonder about doing it themselves, or have come to appreciate the economic bene-ts that the Airbnb units bring to the area. "Guests will go out, walk on the Drive, have dinner there, go shopping there," says Fletcher, who scrupulously pays taxes on their rental income (though not the money for a city business licence). "It seems like there's so many more upsides to the neighbourhood." T he trick for both those interested in the possibilities of sharing economies and those with the job of regulating them is trying to -gure out what is genuinely innovative, consumption- reducing, public-serving and shar- ing—and what is just rule-breaking with a fancy new name. A lot of city politicians, planners and community activists—especially in liberal cities such as San Francisco, Portland or Vancouver—are enamoured of the original sharing-economy model (or, as its purists call it, "collaborative consumption"): cooperative car-share services like Modo, bike-sharing, impromptu outdoor neighbourhood book exchanges, used-clothing trades, tool librar- ies and more. They see those kinds of services as ways to help people buy less in favour of sharing things that were going unused. They also help create community connections. But many of those same people, along with the groups trying to deal with the new businesses calling themselves part of the sharing econ- omy, are less enthusiastic about the Uber-type operations. Alexandra Samuel, a Vancouver tech researcher and analyst who co-authored a report on the collaborative economy, is excited about the possibilities of what it promises: a chance for regular people to improve their incomes and reduce their spending by sharing through technological platforms. "I think it has the potential for people to enrich their lives." But, she says, the term "sharing economy" glosses over what are a lot of di"erent things going on: on-demand services, peer-to-peer connections and consumption through access (not ownership). And "big companies bank- rolled by big money" can come up with sys- tems to provide part of that but not all. The risk is that there will be massive disruption—with social, political and economic consequences, including a depleted tax base and an increas- ingly itinerant, unsecure workforce—but with none of the utopian positives. "If you strip away the veneer of the tech- nolo¡y," says the Teamsters' Smith, talking about Uber, "all we're dealing with are labour brokers. It's the same thing as what you have with farm workers or day labourers and the same level of exploitation that exists with those models." Still, Smith acknowledges that there's more than just technolo¡y at play. "We've got a new economy developing that is strictly task- focused. And we're going to see it everywhere." Many businesses have opted to shift to a more contingent, contracted-out workforce, even those without apps. Estimates are that about 30 per cent of people working in Canada and the U.S. now operate as contract or contingent or on-call employees in the new "open-talent" economy, a percentage that rose sharply in the last decade. The technolo¡y has just made that more possible for some sectors. Uber, for instance, has 2,000 full-time employees but 160,000 drivers as of the end of 2014. Uber and its accomplices are the most trou- blesome for everyone because, of all the new- economy businesses, they are taking on what has been the most regulated industry—the one with the strictest limits on numbers. Taxi regu- lation developed during the Great Depression, as illegal "bandit" cabs proliferated and turf wars broke out. Taxi medallions or licences have, over the years, turned into a strange mar- ket of their own in many cities. In B.C.'s Lower Mainland, taxis have been so restricted that the value of a licence in the market soared far beyond what any driver could hope to recoup simply by driving cab. In 2014, there were 588 licences available in Vancouver trading for $800,000 apiece; another 983 taxis are licensed for all the suburbs, with a half-share of a licence reported as selling for about $200,000 in one court document. Sandy Garossino, a Vancouver political commentator and one-time council candidate who inherited several taxi businesses from her family, says the licences have become the equivalent of condos—a speculative play, OF THE OVER- ALL POPULATION ENGAGED IN NEO- SHARING (UBER, AIRBNB, ETC.), WITH ALMOST HALF (48%) OF NEO-SHARERS BEING BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 34 YEARS OLD * 24% * sourcE: "sHaring is tHE nEW buying," vision critical, 2014 Air BNB (London) Air BNB Share Indie Gogo Kick Starter Crowd Funding Lyft (Miami) Sidecar (Chicago) Etsy Ebay Crowd Spring

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