(City of Kamloops).

By Aaron Schulze

Affordable Housing in Tranquille

Kamloops council votes in favour of parking exemption for potential affordable housing building on Tranquille

Jul 20, 2021 | 6:04 PM

KAMLOOPS — Kamloops council voted in favour of an exemption for a potential 40-unit, multi-family, affordable housing rental building at the intersection of Tranquille and Oak Road, after initially being split.

Five of the multi-family units will be provided as social housing and occupied by youth graduating from the care of the Ministry for Children and Family Development, or from Community Living British Columbia. It will include aground-floor office space.

City staff’s first recommendation was for council to deny a development variance permit for Eas Holdings Limited due to parking restrictions. The development requested a reduction of required parking spaces from 41 to 16, and to increase the maximum parking variance for cash in lieu of a parking space from 10 per cent to 61.

“To my knowledge… I don’t believe they’ve done a thorough investigation and discussed with the other businesses to see if there’s other parking available,” Marvin Kwiatkowski, Kamloops’ development, engineering, and sustainability said. “This kind of reduction we haven’t seen. We’ve gone 10 per cent (parking). If there are parking issues, it will be felt by the businesses fairly early on and we’ll see the complaints.”

Council discussed two other options: deny the development variance permit but suggest Eas Holdings Limited to re-apply under the reduced parking requirements for affordable market housing, or consider the application pending:

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• payment of landscape security in the amount of $139,563
• payment of cash in lieu of parking in the amount of $150,000
• execution of a housing agreement for 5 social housing units and 35 affordable housing units and adoption of a housing agreement bylaw
  (City of Kamloops).

The initial vote on considering the denial was defeated 5-3. Mayor Ken Christian and Councillors Dieter Dudy and Mike O’Reilly voted in favour, while Councillors Kathy Sinclair, Bill Sarai, Denis Walsh, Dale Bass, and Sadie Hunter voted against. Councillor Arjun Singh declared a conflict of interest.

Sinclair said the building targets a specific audience that may not have a vehicle. Such as working people getting their start, high school and university graduates, seniors, or people looking for alternatives to cars by choice or necessity.

“Not seizing this opportunity is prioritizing parking over housing,” Sinclair said. “They certainly have great access to Transit… as well as active transportation. As a former renter for 25 years, there are times when you go look at a place and you’re told very clearly there is no parking. If that is made clear, I don’t see that this is going to present issues. We promote active transportation, and here’s a perfect opportunity to put that into practice.”

Mayor Christian said the proposal looks good on the surface, but the market will dictate who the tenants are.

“It sounds like a very utopian environment where you have persons who are not car centric living there and they would live there in perpetuity,” Christian said. “While those tenants may well accept the notion that there’s no parking coming with that particular unit, they will avail themselves of parking in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the vicinity is the commercial core of the Tranquille Corridor. We’re going to see both visitors and residents parking along that core and we’re going to see businesses complaining to us incessantly about the fact that people aren’t moved along.”

After the denying option was defeated, another vote on considering the project was approved 7-1, with Christian as the only nay.