Residents fight new student housing complex in Lower Doon

More than a dozen delegations have registered to speak about a controversial new student housing complex planned for a patch of land near Conestoga College's Doon campus at the City of Kitchener's Planning and Strategic Initiatives Committee on Monday night.

• Kitchener council looks to improve Lower Doon student housing

• Rise in student housing concerns homeowners near Conestoga College

According to city documents, the complex would be a stacked townhouse development with 47 units in a vacant lot, addressed as 69 Amherst Dr. and 67 Durham St.

Of those 47 units, 40 would be four-bedroom "lodging houses," six will be two-bedroom units and the final townhouse a three-bedroom "supervisor dwelling unit."

"People are really mad as hell," Daryl Howes-Jones told host Craig Norris on The Morning Edition on Monday.

Barb Thomas also lives nearby. She says it's not the students they don't want in the neighbourhood, its the type of development being proposed.

"It's the development itself," said Thomas. "You will have a complex that's four storeys tall and 4.5 meters away from your property line, so it's like a wall of building behind your house, and that really doesn't work in our neighbourhood."

'Blockbusting' the neighbourhood

Howes-Jones said they've seen what he calls "blockbusting" in the Lower Doon area over the past 10 to 15 years.

"Basically what happens is, is that you live in a neighbourhood of single-family residences and someone buys a house next to you and converts it into a boarding house," said Howes-Jones.

"It's not like two or three students in an apartment, this is like eight, 10 rooms in a small house."

"Our fear now is we're at a cusp. Whole neighbourhoods have been bought out by boarding houses, which are illegal, and it's forced the residents to move," said Howes-Jones.

"If this project goes ahead, we see the entire neighbourhood, the community, going downhill."

Legal or illegal?

Boarding houses, or rooming houses, are in fact legal in the city of Kitchener, but must meet specific criteria, according to the new official plan.

According to that official plan, lodging houses for up to three people are allowed on any land zoned for any type of residential use. Lodging houses for between four or more people have to be on land zoned for multiple dwellings.

They generally have separate locking bedrooms and common living areas and to be legal, are to be licensed by the city and inspected annually

Another building application has been proposed for that same land parcel, Thomas and Howes-Jones said on Monday.

Cook Holmes has also applied for a townhouse development in that area an application "100 per cent" of the neighbours support said Howes-Jones.

The residents say they know there's a need for intensification in the area, but don't want it done with boarding houses.

"My fear is it's a precedent-setting development and if this one goes ahead, we'll see much more of this," said Thomas. "That would be changing Lower Doon completely."