And so it begins. The legendary Byron Bay summer. The beautiful people coming out to play. The drum circles in the streets. The dolphins riding the waves with the surfers at Wategos. The town heaving at night. The traffic jammed for miles. The house parties in the lush rolling hills.
Amid all the idyllic glamour and celebrity, the traumatised homeless emerging from cars, vans, tents and sand dunes into the sun-splashed mornings to try to charge a phone or have a shower. They are elderly women, single mothers and working families who can’t find an affordable place to live. Or any place to live.
“A large number are insecurely housed,” says Byron mayor, Michael Lyon. “Paying 60% to 70% of income on rent is not uncommon. Shifting between different places and friends, spending nights in between in vehicles – these are all-too-common stories.”
They are being driven out of homes and out of the shire as the seaside town has become overcrowded and overpriced. Byron is a town breaking under the weight of floods, 2.2 million visitors a year and city people buying holiday homes during Covid, pushing median house prices way beyond the reach of most locals. An estimated 35% of housing is being taken up by short-term rental accommodation.
“We are supposedly a bastion of progressive alternative thinking and environmental consciousness,” says Byron councillor and lawyer Mark Swivel. “But in reality, Byron shire has been a petri dish for the open market. This community exemplifies everything that is wrong with an unregulated property market.”
On Thursday, in what Lyon calls an attempt to “stop the rot”, Byron shire council will vote on a proposal to cap some short-term rental accommodation at 90 days a year.
“We know that the visitation trends are only going to increase,” he says. “So if we don’t do something we will continue to lose long-term rentals. We’ve got to hold the line on our long-term stock now so that when we put a new supply on to the market it won’t be bought by investors and coming into short-term letting as well.”
Lyon believes if the council doesn’t regulate now, other areas such as Mullumbimby will start to convert to short-term rental accommodation “as visitation returns”.
He doesn’t believe the shire will lose visitors because “the occupancy rate is quite low, 60% to 70% in traditional accommodation, like hotels”.
Investors, he says, “make decisions based on the future. The fact that we have been flagging this policy and it looks like it is going to get up, a lot of investors have already switched their properties to long-term or have sold them.”
Although he says “it’s a pretty modest proposal”, there is, he admits, “a lot of money at stake”.
Much of it is in the hands of the group Byron Deserves Better, who have run a vigorous campaign opposing the cap.
Colin Hussey, chief executive of A Perfect Stay, manages 160 properties in Byron Shire. He believes the cap “will devastate the economy”.
“I employ hundreds of people. What other business can you say you have all your expenses all year round but you can only have revenue for 90 days?
“Fifty per cent of what a home rents for goes back into the community through pool cleaners, gardeners, maintenance workers. It gets rid of the highest-yielding tourists, the ones that have the lowest impact. It forces the remaining days into peak periods.”
Hussey says that in a survey of his house owners, “96% said they wouldn’t consider permanently renting them under any circumstances”.
“It won’t solve the problem. These are individually owned homes usually by Aussies because they want a holiday here and to retire here.”
He says even if these high-end properties did come on to the permanent rental market, they would be thousands a week more than an average local barista could afford.
‘There is no availability of housing’
Meanwhile businesses in town are struggling with staff shortages, reduced hours or not opening some days because workers can’t find anywhere to live.
“The biggest economic drag right now is the lack of staff,” Lyon says. “And it’s not just waitstaff and bartenders. It’s professionals, engineers, planners. There is no availability of housing anywhere on the housing ladder. There’s people earning $80,000 or $90,000 a year who can’t find a house so jobs don’t get done.”
For some people, like a septuagenarian who asked not to be named, and who worked in the arts with “no job security, no super, no divorce settlement”, renting her house has “been a gift”.
“It has been miraculous that I can earn an income in my old age renting my house. I know a number of women who are in the same position as me.”
As long as she is a host on the property, she will be able to continue to rent her house 365 days a year. It is only the unhosted houses, whole houses, investment properties, subject to the cap. Likewise houses in the blue-chip beachside areas of Suffolk Park, Wategos, Brunswick Heads and Belongil will be exempt.
There are currently 1,200 unhosted properties registered with New South Wales Planning and 800 hosted. Lyon says there are further properties the government is leasing for the flood affected that will come on to the market when people are housed again.
Michael Crosby, Airbnb’s head of public policy for Australia, says the cap proposal “must be urgently reconsidered”.
He believes the cap is unlikely to increase the shire’s overall housing supply and it “may have unintended and irreversible consequences”.
It will, he says, make it difficult “for visitors who seek accommodation for non-holiday uses such as accessing work, education or medical treatment”.
Airbnb is willing “to support a tourism levy to fund housing and community projects, and support for government reviews of eviction protections to ensure that current systems are fit for purpose and provide adequate housing security for long-term renters”.
Dr Sabine Muschter, a former researcher at Southern Cross University, questions the argument that jobs and money will be lost with the proposed short-term rental accommodation policy.
“In my view, the proposal will not result in a shortage of tourist accommodation as all the exempt precincts will increase bed night availability,” Muschter says.
Councillor Swivel says it is a “vexed issue”. He says the strongest argument for the council directing housing development is the need for key worker housing in health, education and hospitality.
“We should be much more innovative and much more aggressive in the way that we engage with state government to develop particular projects,” he says.
Meanwhile the Byron brand is stronger than ever. And the summer party is just getting started.
