30 BCBusiness august 2015
GeekWire piece that the service could be a sui-
cide bomb that destroys not just taxis but also
transit. "Destructive competition drives prices
so low, at some point it comes apart because
people can't make a living at it," he wrote. "Cars
fall apart. You are into safety issues."
In spite of those potential hazards, how-
ever, politicians have one big challenge when
it comes to clamping down. The people using
and providing these services love this brave
new world.
Vancouver is particularly fertile ground for
the sharing economy. It's a city where a sig-
ni-cant proportion of residents are stressed by
high housing costs and where many of them
have been trying to make ends meet already
through various real estate moves—
renting out their basements, even at
times when it's been illegal, taking in
language students or buying condos
as investments. (There's even a thriv-
ing exchange of parking spaces, so far
un-apped, in condo buildings down-
town.) The peoples of the West Coast
have a looser de-nition of work, as
anyone from Toronto is always ready to gripe
about. They also run more one-person self-
employment operations than elsewhere, and
have been quick to monetize their homes to
run everything from freelance engineering
consultancies to auto-repair businesses. And
they're less patient with regulation. All of this
means that where Airbnb has thousands of list-
ings throughout Metro Vancouver (including
448 in the West End alone), in a city such as
Calgary, where homeowners are less -nancially
stressed, it has only 859 listings in the entire
metropolitan area.
It's for reasons like these that Sylvain Senez
and Alexis Fletcher, who own a modest stucco
bungalow in east Vancouver, decided to start
vancouver is particularly fertile ground for the sharing
economy. it's a city where a significant proportion of
residents are stressed by high housing costs and where
many of them have been trying to make ends meet
already through various real estate moves
SOUND ADVICE
Senez and Fletcher say
neighbours don't complain
but rather ask for advice on
trying Airbnb themselves
the Runway
Task Rabbit
