Some changes may be coming to the Sillers Street area, in an effort to boost interest in land and housing development there.

A bylaw amendment put in front of City Council rezones the area to allow semi attached dwellings.

"It's not the entire street that we're looking at, but there's a number of lots on Sillers Street owned by a local developer named Gustafson. In order to try and spur lot sales, he tried to do some out of the box thinking and part of it was to come up with duplexes being put on those properties, with the property line going along the center line or common wall of the duplex," explained the City of Estevan's Land Development Officer, Richard Neufeld.

"Overall, the number of homes per lot would not increase, we wouldn't be increasing traffic density or anything like that, but it would allow for lower cost housing to go in there, and maybe generate some sales. It still also allows for single detached dwellings like anywhere else."

"Visibly, the biggest change probably that you'll see is a duplex, as opposed to a single detached dwelling. Because with a duplex, you have the lot line going down the common wall, you'd have no side yard on the one side of the dwelling, but you're going to have a really big side yard on the other. One of the things that may happen is you may have a house with a garage attached to the side of the house, rather than the front of the house. We're still trying to work on the aesthetics for it, and in the next few weeks, hopefully the developer will have something exciting to tell," he noted.

No negative feedback has been received on the concept as of yet.

"I was curious as to how the community would receive this, because it is a pretty major change to an established community. But, it seems to be accepted at this point. Normally this is something that you would do when you're doing a new area from scratch, but we'll see what happens," added Neufeld.