Many locals disagree with intensification plans
Ottawa city councillors and their planning staff believe that the very future of our city depends on peppering your neighbourhood with three- and four-storey apartment buildings. A good-sized chunk of Westboro will be the first to experience this brilliant future, but the city's new Official Plan anticipates greater density in every established neighbourhood.
For Westboro, that means four-storey buildings on Churchill Avenue with no limit on the number of units. Byron Avenue, not exactly a major road, will get the same treatment, but with a three-storey limit. Single-family homes on corner lots can be replaced with six-unit buildings and even small streets could have three-storey development.
Over time, the city's plan could dramatically alter the nature of Ottawa's established neighbourhoods, changing forever the urban fabric that makes our city livable and distinct. That seems like quite a big deal, but if you don't like it, too bad. The idea is so self-evidently good that this radical alteration of our city is sailing through city council.
Neither community groups nor most in the development industry are enthusiastic about the city's new apartment mania, but that doesn't matter.
City planning decisions can no longer be appealed and the city is in the process of changing residential zoning so that higher densities are allowed as a right.
You might wonder how this vast city has become so short of future development land that it needs to cram up to 60 per cent of new growth into established neighbourhoods. Most councillors will be quick to tell you that massive intensification is essential. Why, without it, councillors would have to approve development on farmland or new suburbs beyond the reach of transit. City councillors are vehemently opposed to that, except on days when they think it's fine.
One of those days came last week, when councillors decided to reject their own policies and their planners' recommendations by adding farmland to Riverside South and approving a new satellite city on the Tewin lands near Carlsbad Springs. In a single day, councillors undermined the core argument in favour of forced urban intensification.
City councillors' illogic won't slow the intensification push, but their wishful thinking might. The Westboro plan, for example, imagines that there is a market for multi-unit apartment buildings without parking. People in the development industry are not so convinced, arguing that those who can afford an apartment in Westboro also want to own a car.
The difficulty in making a profit is a problem that will deter the big builders. Far from opening up desirable neighbourhoods to the masses, Westboro intensification will produce costly, niche housing.
It's expensive to buy a house, tear it down, then plan a unique replacement building.
The economies of scale that make suburban housing somewhat affordable won't happen in Westboro. It's a market for small, specialty builders at best.
With little discernible intensification enthusiasm from residents of established neighbourhoods, one might have hoped that councillors would step back and say, “Hey, people don't want this. Why are we doing it?”
It's an excellent question. The real answer is that it's essential for councillors to pretend that intensification can meet future housing needs, even if there is little reason to believe that's so. The alternative would be approving more suburban development of the type most councillors have spent years deriding. You know, cars, roads, so-called sprawl, all of that. Councillors are totally against that, except when there is an exception.
One thing they might want to consider, as they go about ignoring public opinion and riling up people right across the city, is that there is an election next year.
Councillors are well on their way to creating that rarest of things, a city election issue people care about, and they are putting themselves on the wrong side of it.
The public can't stop councillors from making arbitrary and damaging planning decisions, but they can fire them. If things keep going like this, councillors are going to have to declare a political emergency.