KAMLOOPS MAYORAL ISSUE #2 – Affordability, the cost of living and entering the housing market

For Nelly Dever, affordability in Kamloops all comes back to taxation.

“At the end of the day, it all comes back to stabilizing property taxes,” said Dever. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with university students and that is their primary concern – ‘Nelly, if you become mayor, how are you going to help us get into affordable housing?’ And as all our viewers know, the landlord is going to download the costs of the property taxes onto the [renter], so we need to stabilize our property taxes. And that is where I want to introduce the co-build initiative.”

Mike O’Reilly said the key to improving affordability will come from densification, and bringing more units to market across all levels of housing. He added the city can’t vilify the single-family home market, noting demand remains.

“Overall, it doesn’t matter if you are looking at renting or owning your own home, it’s supply and demand,” said O’Reilly. “And we need to increase the supply. We have done a good job on that with council, specifically, as we have rezoned properties allowing densification to happen. But we need the market to catch up to council decisions. Outside of that, we do need to continue to not only go up, which is important, we need to continue to develop single-family home lots. And we can’t vilify the single family home market. There are a lot of people and a demand for that product and we need to continue the development and creation of those lots, so affordability is not just for somebody looking to by a two-bedroom condo unit but somebody looking to buy a five-bedroom home for a family.”

Ray Dhaliwal said he would focus on lobbying to remove development cost charges (DCC) from new projects to bring builders back to the table.

“That is another major concern. I actually just received an email… from someone in the healthcare industry and they make pretty good money and they are unable to come up with a down payment to afford housing. But that is right across Canada. I believe it’s our new reality,” said Dhaliwal. “Working with the (BC) Homebuilders, I’ve asked them to reduce the development cost charges, even to eliminate them but they said it’s a provincial item. I will advocate for eliminating the (DCCs). That is a huge part of building anything and trying to build affordable and you add those costs to it, nothing is affordable to build nowadays.

“The only other way is to build up, not out. We have lots of flat land here. Kelson has just done a great job there (with City Gardens). I was just thinking this morning how many units were in there before and how many are there now in that same footage. Building up, four-lex, six-plexes all along our main arteries. And work on the DCCs and bring those costs down.”

Ivory Winston’s day job is as a building designer and he believes work done to open up zoning to allow for more types of housing will be key.

“As a building designer, housing is near and dear to me and I believe we need more of it. We need more housing and not just one or two types of housing. I believe what the provincial government has done in opening up zoning and forcing the cities to do that has been great and we need more of that,” said Winston. “We need to streamline building permits, development permits. I think we have an amazing planning staff, design staff down at development services. And I believe we can do better, and I believe we can push projects through, provide incentives, so there is more infill development as well as new subdivisions of homes. And built quicker, build more efficiently, more efficient building materials. I believe there are ways of doing it. As a building designer, I have tons of ideas and I would love to see if we can shift the needle on making homes more affordable in Kamloops.”

Incumbent Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson refused to be interviewed for our issue stories this week. Kris Lloyd Middleton was under the weather and unable to participate.

by Michael Reeve

KAMLOOPS MAYORAL ISSUE #2 – Affordability, the cost of living and entering the housing market

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