No area of the city seems safe from intensification

Reading the draft of Ottawa's new Official Plan, one is forced to conclude that urban planners and city councillors have gotten development wrong for at least 100 years. Don't worry. The people now in charge at city hall have a plan to fix that.

The details of that plan are creating a certain amount of alarm in Alta Vista, which is no surprise because the city would like the neighbourhood to redevelop at about four times its current density. Alta Vista needs to be fixed, you see, as does a vast swath of the city that planners have romantically dubbed the Inner Urban Transect.

The new secondary plan for the Alta Vista area states, “These low-rise neighbourhood areas are open and spacious, having well-maintained homes, which are set back from the street with many mature trees.” Clearly, that has to be changed as quickly as possible.

People in Alta Vista haven't been singled out for special treatment. The Inner Urban Transect is described as including development from the years before and just after the Second World War. That includes an area that stretches from Bayshore in the west, south to Meadowlands and Walkley roads and east to Blair Road.

If councillors approve the proposed plan, those neighbourhoods will see intensification on a scale never before witnessed in Ottawa. Sorry, old terminology. The word intensification has now been replaced by “regeneration,” according to the city. Presumably, “destruction” didn't test well with focus groups.

Future life in the Inner Urban Transect will fulfil the dreams of planners, if not of residents. Part of the change involves a vigorous attack on the automobile. New auto-related uses will be prohibited, including car dealerships, service stations, drive-through facilities, surface parking lots and, curiously, mini-storage warehouses.

People will be expected to walk, cycle or take transit. Generously, cars will still be permitted, so long as they “do not erode the public realm nor undermine the priority” of cyclists, walkers or bus riders.

It is in the buildings that future Transecites will see the greatest change. If anything is built within 400 metres of a rapid transit station, it must be at least three storeys. Buildings can be nine storeys on main corridors, six on minor corridors.

The city does not stop there, reaching right into those leafy, bungalow-laden streets that make Alta Vista and similar neighbourhoods what they are. Prior to the enlightenment offered by the new Official Plan, one could buy an aging bungalow and replace it with a bigger, more up-to-date home. That will be impossible under the new rules. If you really must replace an old bungalow with a better one, it has to have exactly the same size and footprint as the old one.

Should that not suit, something of two to four storeys must be constructed on the lot. The minimum number of units in that new building has not been set yet, but single family homes won't fit in the city's new density requirements. For example, they boost existing Alta Vista density from 10 to 25 units per hectare now, to either 40 units or 80, depending on the location.

The established neighbourhoods that the city is determined to make vastly more urban were the new suburbs of their day. They might not be in sync with the latest thinking of 2021, but in many respects, they are superior to the suburbs we are building now, a fact that is reflected in property values.

People like these neighbourhoods and are passionately attached to them. Despite that, councillors and their planning staff are determined to take control of every street, deciding everything right down to what you can build on your own lot.

One would have hoped that all of this would have set off political alarm bells with councillors, but the only dissent has been from those who want even more intensification.

Intensification isn't inherently bad. The scope, scale and command-and-control approach the city wants to mandate is.