A Cranbrook-based developer wants to add some multi-family residential units to Rossland’s housing stock.
Mike Keefer’s company, Keefer Ecological Holdings, wants to build three six-unit apartments on a 15-acre site in the city’s Pinewood neighbourhood.
“This is very unlike skier condos, the target market is not out-of-towners,” says Keefer, who lives in Rossland part-time. “These are designed to be residential, that’s who we hope will purchase them.
“The idea is to sell them to people who want to live here. That’s why we plan to have a community garden, to encourage interaction with neighbours in the building and the wider neighbourhood.”
Keefer’s company bought the property earlier this year in a court-ordered sale. And at the last council meeting, they brought forward their request to have the property re-zoned from R-1 residential to multi-family R-3.
An environmental consultant by trade, Keefer says he wanted to do develop the property with the environment in mind.
“We read the city’s community plan, and it speaks strongly to the idea of ‘clustered development’,” he says.
“So the idea is we would take this small portion here, and we would develop it with a high-density footprint, with green space in between the units.
He says the three buildings would only take up about two acres of the property. While some more units could conceivably be put in later, he says the development plan now is to turn over the bulk of the property to public park space.
“We thought it’d be easy to build single-family units, but why don’t we do things differently, and see what council thinks?” he says.
“They recognize the need for new units of multi-family, and from the city’s side there are some good benefits,” he says. “Instead of creating an extra 200 metres of road they have to plow, we are only creating roughly an extra 10 metres of road extension at the turnaround.”
Each unit in the buildings would be about 1,350 square feet, and would come in at about $430,000 each, says Keefer. The buildings would be designed to be energy efficient and make the best use of space, views and ambient light.
“This is not upscale or downscale,” he says. “Pinewood is a nice neighbourhood, and the target market is current professionals who don’t need a large space, or people who are getting older and don’t want to shovel snow.”
Keefer says the additional housing would fit a real need for Rossland.
“I hear over and over again, people are searching for homes and finding very little on the market,” he says. “Or it’s a miner’s shack that was $250,000, but is now over $350,000 and needs $150,000 of repairs to get up to reasonably modern energy efficiency.”
Keefer says if they can get the rezoning approved, they would begin planning and design work for the buildings. They also have to pre-sell about half the units before construction would begin. If everything breaks his company’s way, he says he would hope the first people could move in by next fall.
But he’s up against at time crunch. He’s hoping for the rezoning approval at the next council meeting, on Oct. 9. It’s the last council meeting before the civic election, and the last chance to get initial approvals likely before Christmas.
A public meeting on the rezoning application will be held before the council meeting, when locals get a chance to have their say. He’s trying to fit multi-family housing into a single-family residential neighbourhood, so he may face some pushback. He says he’s already heard some concerns about traffic, and setbacks, but thinks they can be addressed.
“That’s the kind of feedback we want to hear,” he says. “We are very much at the conceptual level right now, and everything can be fluid.”