Vanier zoning rules will soon be brought into line with those in the rest of city,
City plans to bring rules more in line with other Ottawa neighbourhoods
Despite having been part of Ottawa for more than a decade, Vanier still has planning rules that imagine it as its own city, rules that are about to get a major update.
“It’s how do we create that traditional main street along Montreal Road that we’d like to see?” says Mike Bulthuis, the Vanier community association’s president.
As it is, Vanier has two warring characters: the old traditional village of Eastview underneath, and the newer city of Vanier over top, one defined by rules set in the 1980s.
“The Vanier plan imagined downtown Vanier being the primary employment centre,” explains Melanie Knight, the city planner in charge of the update. “The official plan policies are what you’d see 25 years ago, that encourage bigbox retail and the kind of office developments you see in business parks.”
Before amalgamation, Vanier’s planners had to follow provincial instructions that said municipalities had to imagine a downtown and the full array of business and housing types, even though Vanier was just a long walk from downtown Ottawa. The city plans that resulted were largely scooped up intact at amalgamation. They obeyed the law but didn’t make much sense even when they were written, let alone now, Knight says.
“Vanier was planning for itself as a whole city,” Bulthuis agrees. “We’re now one neighbourhood.”
Rideau-Vanier Councillor Mathieu Fleury says the idea is to update the rules so that Vanier becomes more a part of downtown Ottawa while keeping the important parts of the character it developed as a tiny, independent city.
“You can consider Vanier in the greater downtown,” Fleury says, but things are allowed there that wouldn’t be allowed downtown. It’s easy to tear down houses to replace them with parking lots, for instance, something landlords have done to serve federal workers commuting to government offices. A Loblaws on McArthur Avenue was redeveloped with a great big parking lot out front, he pointed out as an example, the kind of thing Westboro residents went to war to stop in their neighbourhood after amalgamation.
“We’re not trying to remove all the parking spots, but we’re trying to be more consistent and have a goal there,” Fleury says.
Especially on Montreal Road, Vanier’s zoning rules allow a sawtooth of heights — up and down and up and down. “And in some cases, the up is in places where we wouldn’t think it made sense to put up today,” Knight says. She hopes to rationalize the zoning to the city’s usual standard of roughly six storeys on main streets, typically with apartments and condominiums over street-front stores. The current rules limit the residential space in the areas designated for commercial uses, what was once a desperate attempt to keep housing from taking over a “business district” where not many people were interested in building offices.
Tall buildings more likely belong along the Vanier Parkway, where the Cummings Bridge comes into the neighbourhood from Sandy Hill and Lowertown across the Rideau River, Fleury says. Done properly, they’d form a gateway to the community, possibly enhanced by a more literal gateway feature akin to the Chinatown Arch on Somerset Street.
“Maybe a commemoration of (former governor general) Georges Vanier,” Fleury tosses out.
Montreal and McArthur should attract business from north and south and be prime shopping territory for new residents at CFB Rockcliffe once it begins to be redeveloped, he says.
Knight is organizing an open house to gather ideas at the end of the month (she’s yet to book a room at the community centre but hopes to start publicizing it imminently), and there’ll be at least one more. Since the idea is to modernize the plan for Vanier, not devise a brand-new one, she hopes to have the work all done and ready for councillors to vote on in May.
Bulthuis’s association hasn’t been involved much yet, but Knight is just getting started. He’s looking forward to it, he says.
“Right now it appears very technical, and maybe we can unpack it to talk about what kind of Montreal Road we want,” he says.