Ottawa Citizen’s Airbnb hit piece. How NOT to do policy analysis.

Yesterday, I had the displeasure of discovering, via Twitter, a piece by two academics, in the Ottawa Citizen, attacking a video my family appears in and the way I pay for the healthcare of my son. Neither the Citizen nor the academics reached out to me before it was published. Nor have they reached out to me since. So I’ll respond in kind with this post.

There’s a lot to disagree with in the piece, which is worthy of a longer post. I may end up writing one later.

What I found particularly striking, as someone who does public policy for a living, is the weakness of the policy argument that piece makes. It’s a perfect “what not to do” piece to give to students and junior policy analysts.

Here are some of the problems, from a policy analysis point of view, with the piece.

Refuting arguments that absolutely nobody is making

A better community for autistic people does not depend upon Airbnb and privatized services but comes through varied supports, educational opportunities and diverse, cohesive communities. Airbnb is not, and should never be, a mechanism of health care of any kind.

No kidding. Does anybody really think families paying $82,000 out of pocket, in after-tax dollars, for healthcare is optimal?!? Families with kids on the spectrum having to make difficult decisions is a symptom of the underlying cause of the failure of governments to provide these “varied supports”.

Glad that’s cleared up. We shouldn’t replace the healthcare system with the gig economy.

Because of the failures in the system, families are having to make all kinds of difficult decisions. My family has pretty much every possible advantage in the world when it comes to getting the supports my son deserves — we have great jobs, a wonderful family, we have all the tools needed to navigate the system. And we can rent part of our house. We’re playing the game on the lowest difficulty setting (we’ve got the equivalent of the Konami Code). And we still struggle. A lot. This is an impossible situation for families without those advantages. This is why we fight for something better.

Assuming a can opener

Or as James Wells put it:

Families cannot access supports for their kids that literally do not exist.

The solution to these very real problems identified in the Ottawa Citizen piece is not to take away the mechanisms families use to provide healthcare to their kids.

False dichotomies

From the Citizen piece:

The making of a vibrant and thriving city depends on the work of people dreaming for something different, something better.

I’m literally doing that every single day. But I still need to navigate the world as it is.

There’s nothing contradictory in fighting for something better and still trying to make your way through the world, as it exists, as best you can.

Assessing the value of public policies based on their intent

The two academics either fail to understand what the proposed regulations that we’re fighting actually do, or they fail to understand what we’re fighting:

And yet, Airbnb wants us to accept residential neighbourhoods without actual neighbours, streets full of ghost hotels that impede community cohesion.

I cannot stress this enough: WE DO NOT RUN A GHOST HOTEL. Yet the new Ottawa regulations ban us from renting part of our house on Airbnb while keeping ghost hotels perfectly legal in 80% of Ottawa.

If the problem is ghost hotels, then why are they largely exempted from the new regulations? And why do the regulations go well beyond ghost hotels, against the advice the consultants the City of Ottawa hired?

What we’re fighting for, and the video is fighting for, is for families to be able to rent out primary residences.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You’d think Ottawa residents would have learned that through the ongoing LRT mess. We need to assess public policies on what they actually do, not so idealized version of how we think they will work.

A lesson for policy wonks everywhere.