When the former rooming house at 331 West Seymour St. caught fire, neighbours rejoiced.
“To be honest, when I saw the flames curling into the sky, I was delighted,” Ralph Adams told Kamloops city council during a public hearing on Tuesday, Jan. 28.
He wasn’t the only one on the downtown block celebrating.
“It was known in the criminal world in Kamloops as a safe house,” neighbour Lorne Samaha said, recalling days when undercover cops would hide in the bushes outside his home to spy on the property.
Another homeowner on the block, Peter Strauss, said in the years he had lived on West Seymour, he was forced to leave work multiple times and head home when neighbours called to tell him someone was casing his house.
Still, his home was broken into five times.
However, while the fire got a stamp of approval from those living on the block, landowner Michael Fane’s plans to build two new single-family homes with basement suites in the space once occupied by the notorious abode did not.
By a margin of 6-2, city council approved a plan to consolidate and re-divide two lots previously occupied by the rooming house and another much smaller lot Fane purchased from the city, as well as a rezoning to allow for secondary suites.
Councillors did so in the face of strong resistance from neighbours.
Many of the opposed homeowners worried Fane would decide to rent out the three-bedroom homes and two-bedroom suites, leading to more problems for the neighbourhood.
“We could quite easily see 20 people on that property, which would exceed the number of people that were there before,” Adams said, adding he wouldn’t be as nervous if there were some guarantee Fane would sell the properties.
Samaha said he wasn’t convinced the lots had enough parking spaces and predicted vehicles from the properties would further clog what is an unusually narrow street.
He said West Seymour Street already has issues with flooding and congestion that should be dealt with before the city agrees to new development.
The 300-block of the road doesn’t have drains or sidewalks.
“It’s like the city forgot about these few streets,” Samaha said.
Fane told council he has no plans to rent the houses and is in the process of getting out of the landlord game.
He said his goal with the two properties is to build affordable homes for young families.
“The legal suites would make those properties affordable to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them,” he said.
Coun. Tina Lange said more traffic on West Seymour is the last thing residents need.
“At every public hearing, when we look at putting in suites, the neighbourhood shows up and they all say the same thing: ‘Traffic, parking, traffic, parking, safety.’
“And, normally, I just kind of ignore that because yeah, it’s Kamloops and we’re densifying,” she said.
But, Lange added, West Seymour is an exception to her rule.
“It’s so narrow. It’s a goat path.”
However, Coun. Nelly Dever believes the homes fit with the city’s goals.
“We’ve talked about affordable housing in Kamloops and infill,” she said. “Now we have something on the table that does both of those and would help a homeowner get that approval.”
Council approved the rezoning with Lange and Coun. Marg Spina opposed. Coun. Nancy Bepple was absent.
Voting in favour were councillors Dever, Ken Christian, Donovan Cavers, Pat Wallace, Arjun Singh and Mayor Peter Milobar.
