City council has been debating what I expect will be a hot topic in upcoming civic elections: secondary suites, where they can be, and how easy they should be to add to the market. Mayor Nenshi was pushing for major revisions to laws around the suites, but the majority of council preferred small, incremental changes: secondary suites damaged in the flood that had been grandfathered in, for example, can be rebuilt without rezoning, for example, much to the relief of the overwhelmed rental market. And a pilot project has been launched to inspect secondary suites for safety and adherence to code, which should come as a relief to tenants looking at their single window and wondering if they could actually crawl out of it in a fire.
So, good stuff, if perhaps not particularly groundbreaking. With the sales market in Calgary as hot as it is, with prices up more than eleven percent over last year, though, there are bound to be more residents looking to rental properties as a stopgap until deposits can be saved up – and plenty of investors will want to be capitalizing on their property holdings by adding basement suites for additional income. Surely once debates begin in the aldermanic races, lines are going to be drawn showing where each candidate stands on increasing our city’s stock of secondary sites, and that could seriously affect outcomes in ridings popular with, say, university students. This is a topic to watch.
