Party Vibe

Letting down the neighbours

Tensions between tourists and locals over holiday rentals in NSW’s Byron Bay may trigger a national showdown, writes Jim Buckell

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au

April 01, 2006

IN a battle that’s taking place in back yards across the country, the belief that home owners should be able to rent to holiday-makers is under attack from the neighbours.

This conflict has boiled over in the beachside and counterculture mecca of Byron Bay on the far north coast of NSW. There, a local population of about 10,000 plays host to up to 1.7 million visitors each year.

It’s estimated that about 500 of the town’s homes are holiday-let, up to 20per cent of all dwellings, and the locals are feeling the strain.

In a struggle that’s pitching green against greed, as some see it, the community that stared down Club Med and McDonald’s has again been stirred into action.

Demographic change and the growth of tourism in the past decade have combined to put the squeeze on holiday landlords. As sea-changers, tree-changers and investors continue their charge to coastal hideaways and mountainside boltholes, residents are becoming increasingly agitated by the transformation. Sleepy rural towns have become bustling commercial hubs with parking problems and traffic congestion, noise complaints and what locals say is a “loss of community”.

According to this argument, long-term residents are being pushed out by rising real estate prices. In their place are holiday lets, properties that are snapped up by investors, many of them absentee landlords who sometimes want to jam in as many bodies with as many beds as possible to maximise returns.

As part of its solution to the problem in Byron, a new Green-controlled council that swept into power two years ago proposed to stamp out what it says is the illegal practice of letting houses on a short-term basis in residential areas.

The battle between two cultures – families and semi-retired residents, and the younger visiting party crowd – is often played out under cover of darkness and becomes most heated in peak holiday periods. During schoolies week or the Christmas break, neighbours are forced to knock on doors in an effort to silence boozy late-night revellers. The sleep-deprived will sometimes seek out agents or absentee landlords on their mobile phones in the wee hours. Others endure the taunts of drunks as they spill through the streets.

Peter and Jackie Wilkosz, founding members of Byron Residents Against Community Erosion, are one couple who have had enough. They’ve seen their neighbourhood, which they chose for its residential ambience, deteriorate since they moved in from Sydney six years ago.

“We’ve watched people sell up and leave the area disgruntled about the noise and other problems,” Jackie Wilkosz says. “And those properties are not being returned to the neighbourhood, they’re all being holiday-let.

There have been four in the past year out of 10 surrounding houses.”

“The problem,” says Peter Wilkosz, “is that the Holiday Letting Organisation [a local group formed to ameliorate noise problems] may be able to control noise in properties, but they are unable to control what happens when people leave those properties.

“We are in a town where there are half a dozen venues with 3am licences. In the old days people would leave for a drink at 7pm and return at 11 or 12. Now they don’t leave until 11 and return in the early morning, making a lot of noise and disturbing the neighbourhood.”

Sometimes their rowdiness becomes what Jackie calls “serious anti-social behaviour”, including smashing bottles, destruction of street signs and letterboxes, and obscene language directed at neighbours who have made complaints.

On the other side of the debate, the HLO has garnered considerable support by forming its own security and management system to deal with noise complaints. Spokesman John Gudgeon, however, will not budge from his position that to let one’s house in the short or long term is a “basic right that’s been entrenched in Australian values forever”. He believes the issue is “a behaviour management problem” that should not be addressed by banning holiday letting, which he describes as “a traditional Australian right”.

“What I’ve done and many Australians have done all our lives is to hire houses all over Australia for holidays, that’s our preference.”
Legally, that so-called right, as tenant or landlord, is dubious at best and probably nonexistent. The problem is that up until recently a blind eye was often turned.

But councils up and down the coast have been citing a 2003 NSW Land and Environment Court decision upholding a complaint from the Sutherland Shire Council that an apartment in a Cronulla block zoned residential was illegally let for short-term holiday accommodation.

But the problem is not confined to the coast. The Snowy River Shire Council in NSW has been running what it says is a successful campaign to crack down on illegal holiday letting in its snowfields and fishing towns, including Jindabyne, since 2002.

One of the burning issues for local government is what Byron mayor Jan Barham calls a “level playing field”. A recent survey of coastal towns by the Australian Local Government Association found that the influx of tourism is putting pressure on small communities, especially on water supplies, beaches and vegetation. Traditionally, councils have managed these pressures by levying fees on developers of tourist facilities such as serviced apartments, hotels, hostels and bed and breakfasts. But because they fall outside the guidelines, holiday lets have escaped such levies, but that may change in Byron if the new regulatory system under discussion gets up.

After a stormy summer in which the letters pages of the local papers were inundated with arguments on all sides, it appears that calm may soon be restored. For the moment, the community seems to be headed for a compromise.

The champion of the middle ground is Chris Hanley. He’s a real estate agent, but one who is about as far from the Bob Jelly mould of SeaChange fame as you can get. Hanley dabbles in a bit of writing and started the annual Byron Bay Writers Festival, now a respected event on the country’s literary map.

His interests form the kind of duality that’s unremarkable in Byron. After all, this is rainbow country, where Alternative is spelled with a capital A and worn as a badge of honour; where the proliferation of complementary therapies is rivalled only by the backpacker-led growth of the rave dance and pub culture; and where some of the finest regional restaurants in the land rub shoulders with the cheap and cheerful vegetarian cafe run by the Hare Krishnas.

But it’s also where altruism meets avarice.

Not far from the Krishna cafe, the humble Cardamom Pod, Hanley manages many of the town’s most prestigious holiday-letting properties, some of which command up to $8000 a week in peak season. A resident of the town for 20 years, he has observed the evolving neighbourhood problem and its effect on the tourism-dominated economy that emerged after the decline of dairying and meat processing in the early 1980s. But unlike some other real estate operators who’ve been content to cash in, he has set in place a plan to find a solution.

“The last normal year we had here was 1999,” he says from his office that backs on to a laneway behind the town’s “top pub”, the landmark Beach Hotel owned by producer-director John Cornell, long associated with Paul Hogan. “Since then there’s been the millennium celebrations, September 11, the Bali bombings and so on. That’s led to increased local tourism and an explosion of demand for holiday letting. The whole town’s turned into a bedroom.”

A few years ago Hanley and four other local real estate agents approached the council with a proposal: use planning laws to ban holiday letting in residential areas but keep it in what he describes as traditional holiday zones. These would include the CBD and beachside precincts, including Watego’s, nestled on the hillside beneath the lighthouse, and narrow strips either side of town and at Suffolk Park to the south.
But the proposal that emerged in a much more radical form in council’s draft local environment plan earlier this year would have banned holiday letting in all areas except the CBD.

This went too far for many business owners, who felt the plan failed them. Angry ads appeared in the papers predicting the death of tourism. The local Chamber of Commerce called for the abandonment of the plan.
A fortnight ago a petition and a T-shirt with the words “Not happy Jan” appeared across town. Some locals choked at this cheeky reference to the mayor, but many chuckled. Insiders say that many Green supporters were puzzled by the hasty decision to release the draft document without impact assessments. Others were worried about the justice of taking the axe to holiday letting in areas such as Watego’s and Belongil, where it has been going on for more than 20 years. Hanging over the process is the threat that if council botches the planning instrument and the community remains split, NSW government intervention is likely.

But wiser counsel seems to have prevailed. At a community forum last week, stakeholders in the debate put their weight behind a compromise along the lines suggested by Hanley.

Across the nation, councils will be watching the outcome in Byron Shire.

Many are beginning to experience similar problems.

Queensland University of Technology professor of management Robert Waldersee has taken a keen interest in Byron’s tourism dilemma. He’s backing the move to limit holiday letting, which he says is a “triple whammy” in residential areas.

“First, it displaces members of the community, and the reason people come to Byron is the community,” Waldersee says. “Second, the reason a lot of young people stay in holiday lets at the lower end of the market, say around $2000 a week, is that they are effectively getting accommodation for the price of a tent site. At the bottom end these people don’t have money to spend. They aren’t interested in yoga classes, alternative health services, homewares or the art businesses and so on that make Byron special. They are spending less than permanent residents they are displacing.

“Finally, the type of person who wants to come to Byron and do a yoga class and alternative activities doesn’t want to be overrun with partygoers. They are incompatible market segments and you can’t serve both at once.

“You can’t put steerage in first class and expect first class to stay happy.”
First class? How the counterculture in Byron has changed. Jim Buckell is a Byron Bay writer.