Kamloops Council is still stick-handling the thorny issue of how to deal with a lot of illegal secondary suites in the city.

Mayor Ken Christian admits council has a tough task in regulating suites and bringing all the illegal ones across Kamloops into the fold.

“I think we have to be reasonable right now,” he said. “We’ve got kind of a fairly calm situation but there are certainly some neighbourhood disputes that flare up from time to time that we adjudicate.”

“We have to walk that line between what is helping housing, particularly student housing in this community and what is people trying to accomplish in terms of paying for their mortgages and affordability of homes.”

Christian says it would make the affordable housing situation worse to have bylaw officers rooting out illegal suites.

He adds in the same token you don’t want people living in units that are unsafe and not up to code.

“The intrusion in neighbourhoods is something we have to talk to neighbours about,” added Christian. “The parking issue always comes up.”

“If you look at Kelowna, I think they have 2500 Airbnb listings, we have about 150. You can assume that is people have a secondary suite, it could be a rented secondary suite on a nightly basis, so how does that affect neighbourhoods?”

He says council is taking all of those issues into consideration.