Clayton Heights is my home and I enjoy and love my community. I live alongside great neighbours and their tenants and the area are clean and quiet.
I live in a five-bedroom home with a legal coach home over my garage. I pay tax on my home and on my coach home. My home, along with most others, has three bedrooms up on the third floor and two spacious bedrooms on the finished basement level. My basement is not equipped with a kitchen.
I live with my wife and our 16-year-old daughter upstairs, while downstairs my mother-in-law stays, along with my sister. There is a nice full washroom downstairs along with plenty of room for two.
We all use the spacious kitchen on the main floor – plenty of room in a house this size for five people. I have a car, my wife has a car, my mother-in-law has a car, my sister has a car and my daughter wants a car.
My wife and I park in the garage and the coach house tenant parks in the space provided beside the garage. This leaves two cars (maybe three) to park in the street.
The real issue here is the fact that a home the size of mine (five bedrooms over 2,800 square feet) has only two parking stalls. The coach home has only one small spot.
If we kick out all the illegal basement suite tenants in Clayton Heights, then who will sleep in the bedrooms downstairs? The answer is simple: People will still sleep in those bedrooms.
They may be family, friends, room-and-boarders, or students, but surely someone will use those big spacious bedrooms provided in almost every home in the Clayton area.
They will make garbage, they will require parking, they will use local services. So if people think removing kitchens from all the basements of all these homes will somehow reduce the amount of people living in these large homes, they are being ridiculous.
The houses have already been built so not much point in crying over spilled milk. Let’s move forward and make sure that city planning understands in the future that homes of these size require more than two parking stalls.
A house of five bedrooms should have parking for four cars (small driveway with garage) and the coach home should have parking for two.
Then we would all be happy and stop complaining about the parking and congestion issues.
S. Anderson, Surrey