By Chad Klassen

In midst of rising housing prices, city hopes legal secondary suites can help

Apr 2, 2019 | 5:15 PM

KAMLOOPS — With news the median price of a Kamloops home exceeded the $500,000 mark last month, the growing cost of real estate has caught the eye of the city. 

Not being able to predict control the real estate market, the city is working to make housing more affordable, including the creation of more legal secondary suites. 

“I think the concern right now is around the housing stock in our community,” said community planner Carmin Mazzotta. “We want to ensure there is a diversity of housing options to meeting the needs of residents, some of that being some affordable, market rental housing options, but also housing options for people who want to get into the home-ownership market.”

The city estimates about 200 out of the 3,000 secondary suites that are known about in Kamloops are actually legal and built to code. 

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At City Hall on Tuesday, Mazzotta updated council on where the process is at. He says suites can be the recipe for first-time home buyers to crack into the market. Council, and the more than 1,000 residents who responded to a survey sent out by the city, mainly support the idea of creating more secondary suites to help with affordability. 

“The issue of mortgage affordability and the ability to offset the mortgage costs with some income from your house really is going to help first-time homebuyers,” said Christian. “This is not a crisis in Kamloops, but affordability is real in Kamloops in terms of stretching people’s ability to qualify, particularly first-time people.”

On Monday, the Kamloops & District Real Estate Association released numbers indicating the median price of a home in Kamloops jumped from $462,000 in March 2018 to $502,000 this March. 

“It’s a new number for us, but really it’s because we had a 30 per cent increase in those houses that sold over $600,000,” said president of the real estate association Wendy Runge. “Median price changes from month to month. It’s not setting a new norm, per say.”

The average price of single-family homes last month, on the other hand, went up from $471,000 to $488,000. 

“Average single-family home price is still around that $488,000 mark, so that takes everything into consideration. The low end to the high end,” said Runge. “It’s up a little bit, but not a drastic increase month over month or even year to year.”

Meanwhile, Mazzotta says the next step on the path to more legal secondary suites in Kamloops is drafting zoning bylaw, traffic bylaw, and business bylaw amendment options. He says staff would come back to council in May with amendments before it goes ahead to a public hearing sometime this summer. 

The biggest concern residents have expressed through feedback is parking, which they argue would lead to congestion in many neighbourhoods.