The state government has intervened to strip the local council in Byron Bay of its authority to limit the use of residential properties for holiday accommodation, just one day before a much-anticipated council vote on the issue.
Byron Shire Council was due to debate and vote on a proposal at its ordinary meeting on Thursday that would amend planning laws to reduce the number of days that properties in certain zones in the shire could be rented out to tourists through platforms like Airbnb.
The proposal would only apply to houses and units where there was no host present, and came amid concerns about rising homelessness in the popular coastal community.
In some areas, the maximum number of allowable days would drop from 180 per year to 90, reducing the financial incentive to favour short-term holiday letting over long-term rental.
In June, the New South Wales government had appointed the council as the approval authority for the proposal, which had been years in development.
At the time, the then-acting deputy secretary of planning land use and strategy at the Department of Planning and Environment, Catherine Van Laeren, said the council had been given this authority as a consequence of “the unique and exceptional circumstances facing Byron”.
On Wednesday, however, the NSW Department of Planning and Environment announced it would be changing tack and taking recommendations instead from the NSW Independent Planning Commission (IPC) on “whether the government should allow the proposed changes to go forward”.
Byron Shire mayor Michael Lyon said in a statement late on Wednesday that he was “surprised and disappointed” at the 11th-hour decision by the state government.
“We have been working towards this for several years and our proposal to cap areas for [short-term rental accommodation] to 90 days in parts of the Byron Shire is a modest one seeking balance, in the best interests of our community,” Lyon said.
The Byron community has come under increasing housing pressure over the past few years, with escalating levels of homelessness, rising rents and a rapidly shrinking pool of available long-term rentals exacerbated both by flooding disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Up to 35% of housing in the region is estimated to be taken up by short-term rental accommodation, while available long-term rentals have declined by 10% since December 2020.
The council voted unanimously in favour of the proposed cap at its meeting on Thursday, but acknowledged they were now facing another set of obstacles with the planning commission.
Speaking in support of the proposal at the meeting, Lyon said it was important the council “sends a really strong message on this, as united as we can be”.
“It’s so important to the future provision of housing supply in our shire that we set ourselves a really strong foundation, that isn’t going to see any future additional supply whittled away by the conversion to short-term letting,” he said.
Multinational short-term accommodation platform Airbnb had pushed back against the proposed changes, appealing to the council to “urgently reconsider”, arguing it was “unlikely to increase the shire’s overall housing supply to meet demand, and may have unintended and irreversible consequences for the town’s visitor economy”.
“This is a really modest proposal and the kickback from the industry in my view is to be expected but it’s unfair,” Lyon said. “We have to look out to the broader community and it’s absolutely essential to the future of our shire.”
The NSW government’s deputy secretary of planning, Marcus Ray, said in a statement that the involvement of the IPC would “guarantee independent consideration” of the proposal.
“We acknowledge this may disappoint council, but non-hosted [short-term rental accommodation] in Byron Shire is a complex and contentious matter. There’s been conflicting advice to date on what impact this proposal would have on tourism in the region and whether it would have a positive impact on the long-term rental market,” Ray said.
