(Image credit: CFJC News)

By Sydney Chisholm

Housing Supply Act

Proposed Housing Supply Act could change ‘the very makeup’ of Kamloops stratas: broker

Nov 22, 2022 | 4:40 PM

KAMLOOPS — While it’s unclear how the proposed Housing Supply Act will affect the City of Kamloops, the B.C. NDP government is moving forward with their new housing initiative. If passed, the province will be able to implement housing targets for municipalities and monitor their progress.

“The act enables compliance options as a last resort, should municipalities with the highest need struggle to create the conditions that are necessary to ensure housing gets built,” the B.C. government said in a news release.

In addition to the Housing Supply Act, the province announced amendments to the Strata Property Act, that if approved would immediately end all strata rental-restriction bylaws and remove age restriction bylaws for adult-only communities. This will not affect 55-and-over strata housing.

Stratas would also be able to appear at the Residential Tenancy Branch to evict problem tenants and recover costs of those appearances.

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“I think on the strata front, obviously, I think it’s going to open up more rentals potentially but in the same breath, there were people who paid a significant premium to buy a unit, even two weeks ago or two months ago that didn’t allow rentals,” City Councillor Mike O’Reilly, told CFJC News.

According to Craig McIntyre, managing broker at CML Properties, strata rules are most often created by those living within the community or development to fit their desired lifestyle

“They [the strata board] choose among themselves as owners how they are going to build their community,” said McIntyre. “By removing this – certain rental restrictions – the very makeup of the community and the way it’s been structured itself, will change.”

While banning rental restrictions may open up new rentals in other parts of the province, McIntyre says the Kamloops rental market won’t see the same results.

“Kamloops has been an open market,” he said. “There may be certainly more product available in restricted markets like Kelowna and Vancouver.”

O’Reilly believes a more effective solution to the city’s housing supply problem is sitting unused in the downtown core. According to the councillor, the provincial government owns about 13 acres of land in downtown Kamloops that could accommodate about 2,500 homes.

“We are landlocked as a city, with the amount of lands that are in ALR, so the province is going to need to come forward and open up lands that they currently own that we can do multi-family housing on,” O’Reilly said.

“It’s very underutilized land– anybody that’s driven by Sixth Avenue and Columbia Street has seen the old forestry and ministry of highways building sitting there and knows that, that’s a tear down and that whole area is flat and buildable land which we all know we are very short of in Kamloops.”

If passed, the Housing Supply Act is slated to come into effect in the middle of next year.