Intensification in Sandy Hill needs to be done properly
Sandy Hill is Ottawa’s prime territory for new apartments the city needs, but we’re a long way from figuring out how to make them welcome there.
Consider a four-storey building in the works for a group of lots at 407 Nelson St., in the middle of a block just east of the University of Ottawa. The project doesn’t need a rezoning, just approval of its details. Because Sandy Hill, and a handful of other downtown neighbourhoods roughly hugging the Rideau River, have unusual zoning.
Most of Sandy Hill has zoning one notch denser than the bulk of downtown’s residential streets, which max out at triplexes. In what’s called an “R4” zone, you can build a four-storey apartment building that occupies more of its lot and packs in a lot more people. Practically, that’s when digging an underground garage starts to make financial sense and where you get buildings constructed for the purpose of renting apartments out.
This is what’s happening on Nelson Street, where the plan from a Kanata-based developer is for 55 bedrooms in four storeys (counting a few in a half-basement level). Each small bedroom, according to the floor plans filed with the city, will have its own bathroom. With the edge of campus a block away, University of Ottawa students will obviously be a big part of the market for it, but it’s not quite a purpose-built student residence.
“One of the common concerns we get from the community (about other buildings) is it’s all one type of unit,” said its architect Robert Martin, who’s designed a lot of student-oriented apartment buildings in Ottawa in the last few years. “This building will have a variety, with three- and two- and one-bedroom units. By providing a diversity of unit sizes, you can get a healthier mix of residents.”
The building isn’t really suited to families — it’s for singles and people with roommates. But Martin said it could appeal to “young urban professionals,” people out of school but not ready to settle somewhere more permanently.
That’s still a very narrow demographic, said Chad Rollins, the president of Action Sandy Hill, the local community association. Action Sandy Hill is fine with apartments, he said (Sandy Hill has tons of them) but they should be places a person or family might stay for more than a few years.
“People really can make their lives in apartments if they’re well-designed, with a little bit of space,” he said. This building is obviously for a transient population.
“The whole issue of intensification in existing neighbourhoods is obviously a sensitive one,” Martin said. “I would say this kind of project, especially in its immediate street context, is a very reasonable fit …. I would also say that this and some other projects, if they’re well done, may have the beneficial impact of removing some of the pressure on the other single-family housing stock.”
The “immediate street context” includes two-storey houses, three-storey apartments up the block, renovated duplexes and older houses converted into rentals. One of the lots this building will take up is vacant.
This particular block is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. A four-storey apartment block will be the biggest thing there but it’s hard to say it absolutely doesn’t belong. But, said Rollins, it’s still basically a box.
“It’s not terribly offensive, I guess, but it’s sort of the standard in Ottawa, which is it’s OK but not great,” he said. It won’t evolve with the neighbourhood.
The city is working on rules for intensifying development in R4 zones like Sandy Hill’s, trying to allow it without ripping up the neighbourhoods too badly. A new bylaw is due in the fall.
Intensification is a process nearly as disruptive as when farmers on the suburban fringes sell out to subdivisions and golf courses. Individual property owners can make a bunch of money but the development that comes afterward changes the area irreversibly.
One reason for Toronto’s current housing problem is that zoning makes it really hard to build at medium densities there. You see condo forests and singlefamily houses but relatively little in between. That doesn’t stop redevelopments in existing neighbourhoods, though: you just get older houses torn down and rebuilt monster-fashion for people who can afford them.
The longer this goes on, the more money gets sunk into those million-dollar houses, the more fiercely their owners fight to preserve them, the harder reform gets, the farther out sprawl goes and the farther up the condo towers reach.
Ottawa has a chance to head off the worst of this ugly sequence, if we can get it right.