By Chad Klassen

BUILDING KAMLOOPS (Part 1): Challenges of expanding the city over the next 20 years

Jun 21, 2018 | 4:07 PM

In CFJC Today’s first installment of our new series Building Kamloops, we take a closer look at the newly revised Kam Plan, which was finalized in April, and how the city will accomodate for more growth. The Kam Plan projects there will be another 30,000 people moving to Kamloops in the next 20 years and another 13,000 housing units will need to be built. Chad Klassen looks at the development landscape in the city and some of the challenges developers could face in the coming years.

The City of Kamloops has been growing quickly over the last couple years as people from the Lower Mainland flock to the Southern Interior for less expensive housing. 

Census numbers from 2016 has the Kamloops population at more than 90,000 people and that number is increasing at a rate of 1.25 per cent every year, according to the city. The new Kam Plan, released in April, reflects that growth as well. 

“We’ve looked at a horizon of about 120,000 people with this next version of Kam Plan,” said Kamloops mayor Ken Christian. “And certainly the road infrastructure, the water, the sewer infrastructure that we have would handle that kind of volume.”

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The growth has created a housing boom in the city and local developers and builders are trying to keep up with demand. 

“Right now, the last couple years, the market’s been great, so it’s a challenge to get the product to the market. It takes time to get through the municipal approval stage. It takes time to develop,” said President of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC Matt McCurrah, who’s also a developer in Kamloops. “So the developer has to be gambling, thinking ahead about the market conditions. The developers are trying to keep up with the demand for lots.”

The challenge, however, is securing building lots with most of the easily accessible land in Kamloops already developed. 

“Kamloops is becoming a tougher and tougher place to develop geographically. We’re getting up into the mountains now,” said McCurrah. “It’s more expensive to develop, it’s more expensive for the city to maintain, so there are challenges about building here.”

Builders in the city know that well and they are facing a property crunch. Limited space is also driving up the price of lots, and ultimately the price of homes in the newly developed areas of town.

“You start look at the lots now with the development cost charges. Let’s call it land availability, where we start to life up on higher sites. You start getting view lots. The City of Kamloops is now enteraining $400,000 lots,” said local builder Doug Wittal from DW Builders. “We’ve never heard of that. But for some people in the City of Vancouver, that seems remarkably cheap.”

The combination of fewer lots and higher prices for those lots has Kamloops in a situation where it will have to densify in certain areas to accomodate the 13,000 units needed to keep up with population growth. 

“The development community really needs to face the fact that there’s going to be increased costs with servicing those areas, so it makes more sense for us to focus on densification in the downtown area,” said Christian. “We already have the infrastructure, and that’s what virtually every other city is doing.”

But builders and developers says people moving to Kamloops are looking for space. 

“Densification downtown isn’t what the majority of people want,” said Wittal. “There will always be people that want to be downtown, high-rises, smaller condos, [but] what we’re seeing in Kamloops is people from out of town moving in. They want the lots. They want the single-family lots.”

McCurrah added, “There’s a demand for both. But with the attraction of people coming from the Lower Mainland, they want homes and they won’t necessarily want to live in higher density. Some will, but they’re coming for the attraction of the lifestyle, which means they have boats, they have RVs, they have recreational activities they want to participate in, so it’s important that we keep land available for single-family homes.”