A 1941 house in the Queen’s Park neighbourhood will be demolished if it can’t find a new home – but that may be a little tricky to do.
On Monday night, council supported the city’s land use and planning committee’s recommendation to approve a demolition application for the house at 219 Second St. When considering the demolition request, the committee was told the applicants had explored retention of the house as a large laneway house or as an infill house small-lot subdivision, but concluded they wish to proceed with demolition and new construction.
“This is the first time we are going through something like this,” applicant Marko Majkic told council Monday night. “We are not builders, we are not developers. This is a place for our family. Now we are finding ourselves in a bit of a pickle, as you would say, as we are going through this process. We have never gone through this process before.”
The 1941 house is not a legally protected building in the Queen’s Park heritage conservation area. Because the property is located in the heritage conservation area, a new house will have to meet certain design guidelines.
“It’s going to fit exactly into the neighbourhood,” Majkic said. “We are not going to do something extravagant or something that’s going to look horrible in the neighbourhood. It’s going to go with the guidelines. We are not going to be asking for any variance or anything like that.”
Majkic is willing to make the existing house available for someone who wants to move it to a different location and preserve the house, but that’s proving to be challenging.
“To this date, we haven’t been able to find a company that can actually do it,” he said. “The biggest company that does it … they have basically said, ‘We would love to take the house and preserve it ,’ and then they came in and looked at the trees and said, ‘There is No way to move this house up and down the street, there is no exit.’ We are in a very tight position.”
Kathleen Stevens, the city’s heritage planning analyst, recently told the land use and planning committee that the community heritage commission discussed the matter at its May meeting and recommended city council consider formal protection of the home through a heritage designation bylaw. She noted, however, that the city’s practice is to designate properties only with the consent of the owner, and pointed out that staff don’t believe the heritage value of this house is significant enough for the city to unilaterally require designation.
At the land use and planning committee meeting, Coun. Chinu Das questioned “out of curiosity” the financial cost to the city if it forced the property owner to retain the house and not approve its demolition.
Stevens said the city would likely have to pay the homeowner compensation for any loss in value, if they were unable to develop the property to its full potential under zoning entitlements.
“We don’t have exact estimation because we haven’t been in that position before, and there are very few municipalities in the province who have put themselves in that position,” added Emilie Adin, the city’s director of development services. “It would probably involve getting third party valuation of the property before and after the heritage designation to be able to give you an estimate on that difference.”
