St. Albert Gazette readers will certainly have noticed several articles regarding the informal boarding house situation occurring at 3 Gould Place. If you happen to be one of the other neighbours in that cul de sac, you don’t need the situation explained to you.
For everyone else, it seems the house in question has, for whatever reason, been rented out to a crew of construction workers. The crew, at times numbering up to 30 but recently at about 15 according to recent e-mails to the Gazette, is making the noise and activity that are normally found outside a hotel, restaurant or work camp.
A residential neighbourhood is not a hotel, a restaurant or a work camp. The home in question is zoned R1 Small Density Residential, which means the neighbourhood, including the roads, intersections, trash pick-up, acoustics and parking are all engineered to accommodate homes that hold one family.
Zoning, simply put, is the act of planning ahead to minimize or eliminate land use conflicts. The reason zoning exists in the first place, especially in an urban area, is the result of trial and error. The rules in place are an attempt to ensure that families willing to spend what it takes to buy a home in a quiet neighbourhood actually get what they paid for.
Those who choose to live in a condominium realize that they have neighbours close by and a much busier traffic situation. Those who choose to rent an apartment or live in a hotel, both of which may be zoned in an area with heavier traffic or commercial developments, must realize what they’re getting when they move in.
Multiple families have contacted the Gazette with their frustration and anger at this situation. The owner and apparent landlord of the home in question, Trevor Matheson, was contacted by this newspaper last week. The discussion was brief and cordial, but Matheson declined to make any comment about the situation.
City of St. Albert city manager Patrick Draper has told the Gazette several times this issue is proceeding according to a specific process.
The neighbours who’ve contacted the Gazette have noted they can’t sleep in their own bedrooms anymore, but have to use different rooms in the house to escape the sound of a dozen or two diesel trucks being fired up at 5 a.m., or watch the fleet of vehicles make a mass exodus out of the neighbourhood every morning through intersections that were never engineered to act as off-ramps for hotel traffic.
The end of the day is no treat for these homeowners either, as the fleet of construction vehicles returns en masse.
It’s assumed zoning bylaws in St. Albert, as in other municipalities, exist for a reason. Land use processes can be expensive and time consuming. Ask anyone who’s participated in the development of a sewage lagoon or landfill. But the de facto purpose of zoning and planning in the first place is to prevent conflicts like the one occurring in the Gould Place cul de sac.
Everyone involved in this situation should look quickly and closely at their own decisions and responsibilities and act in a decisive manner. St. Albert should be a community that follows its own rules and acts as an example to other municipalities.
