Am I the only one who wants Halloween canceled so I can just eat the candy I bought?
- Looks like it will be a wet/snowy winter in Windsor, assuming participation doesn’t care that the border with Detroit is closed.
- In case you forgot there was a war happening in Central Eurasia. A pretty good summary and map below.
- The Stormwater Finance Study Survey ends on Monday. The survey asks some interesting questions particularly around how to fund the storm water expansion including taxing hard surfaces and implying potential incentives for water gardens and rain barrels. Will be interesting to see the discussion at Council.
- Keep your eye out for the next Mean, Median and Moose Podcast, coming soon!
- As someone who has written numerous grants, both successfully and not, one thing you never do is blame the person who writes you a letter of support for your grant not being approved. They might not write you a future letter….
- I don’t know anything about indigenous fishing rights, but as someone who has loosely followed what is happening in Nova Scotia, this announcement is certainly interesting.
- I have been thinking a lot about housing. The above chart shows the correlations between being a renter and homeowner and whether or not your housing was unsuitable or requiring major repairs in Essex County at the time of the Census. Correlations are generally measured on a scale of 0 to 1 with a score of greater 0.3 seen as having some validity.
- Then this article popped up in Toronto Life that someone in Toronto bought 20 properties in Windsor, and that is creating wealth, for him in Toronto! To be fair he does have a good story and I don’t grudge upon him taking advantage of Windsor’s situation. Unfortunately, Windsor’s affordability has in my opinion create bubble like characteristics in our local housing market. The parallels to the major metro bidding wars of a few years ago look to see what is in our future, just at a smaller scale.
- From CMHC data we are seeing that mortgage debt is rising in our community (and all of Ontario) while for many comparably sized communities outside of the province it seems to be declining.
- According to CMHC total debt in Windsor including mortgages, cars loans, credit cards, lines of credits and others totals over $14 Billion in Q1 2020. Yay wealth creation!
- This was an increase of 3% between 2017 and 2020 during what was arguably a strong time in our local economy.
- According to CMHC total debt in Windsor including mortgages, cars loans, credit cards, lines of credits and others totals over $14 Billion in Q1 2020. Yay wealth creation!
- Continuing with the housing thread, the City of Windsor Airbnb regulation are regressive and will hurt people, like me.
- I have in fact Airbnb’ed my spare bedroom.
- It isn’t anything fancy but it has it own TV and space and I have had a few students looking to look at U Windsor and someone whose family member was at HDGH stay with me.
- Now I did not regularly post my spare room (I haven’t since COVID started), I was selective in who I let stay, and which days I did it but it was a decent way to make some additional income.
- All in for the few visits that I had I probably made an extra $150-$200 a month and Airbnb did remit the 4% tax to the City.
- I took part in the City consultation back in Feb just before COVID. It wasn’t much with a survey and a meeting at the Aquatic centre. It wasn’t anything impressive in my opinion.
- What I saw during it was this process was NIMBY feelings in certain parts of the City driving an agenda and others using this measure to then justify a broader student/rental registry that was previously not supported. I have little sympathy for the former, slightly more for the later. That being said, IMO there is a better balance in regards to what is proposed in council direction (starting on PDF 272).
- Allow me to provide an example. Within the proposed regulations a maximum of 3 people could stay at an Airbnb. Although not applicable to my house, what if there was a basement or upstairs with 2 bedrooms in it, that could sleep 2 couple comfortably and reasonably. The limit of three people within a single dwelling means a family of 4 can no long stay in an Airbnb in Windsor unless there is a separate and registered apartment unit.
- Based on what is been reported, I probably won’t put my room up anymore. The regulations will like cost me too much, as I would have to up my insurance, the registration will probably have a fee to pay for the “cost recovery” of by-law enforcement.
- This will probably mean more by-law officers needed to be hired but they will not necessarily being able to tackle some of ongoing backlogs in the system.
- I would argue that many of the complaints around Airbnb, would be managed if the City effectively funded by-law enforcement in the first place. Those complaints could be rapidly and effectively be managed unfortunately from my perspective the department is still feeling the hangover of “holding the line”.
- We had our first day with 0 cases this week! Unfortunately the province now has 1,000 case per day.
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