City mulls 28-storey buildings in Vanier

Committee to vote on neighbourhood plan update next Tuesday

Anticipating a condo boom in Vanier mirroring the one in Little Italy, the city is preparing to allow developers to construct buildings there as tall as 28 storeys.

Next Tuesday, city council’s planning committee is to vote on an update to the neighbourhood plan for the area, modernizing the last land-use plan from the former city of Vanier. The general idea is that Vanier should be more walkable and more densely populated, especially along Montreal Road and McArthur Avenue, two old main streets that have got too car-oriented since the mid-1900s. And it should be a better-defined community, a place with public gathering spaces and its heritage on display, a place where you can tell when you’re entering it and when you’re leaving it.

That’s where the taller buildings come in.

‘Blank facades facing any street will not be permitted.’ Proposed update to Vanier’s neighbourhood plan

The new policy isn’t to allow them just anywhere: the tallest ones would be restricted to the western edge of Vanier, close to the Cummings Bridge leading to and from Lowertown and Sandy Hill, and only allowed as part of a master plan that would involve the beautification of the immediate area. It would be easier to build shorter buildings of around 18 storeys, though they’d have to be set back from the street to make sure they don’t loom over pedestrians,

Anything new would have to be constructed with something “active” at ground level, ideally stores. “Blank facades facing any street will not be permitted,” the proposed plan says, covering any of Vanier’s major streets.

Little Italy’s condo boom, especially around the Carling O-Train station, took the city by surprise and it had to deal with numerous applications for tall buildings before it had a coherent plan for them. It has only a handful of planning applications open in Vanier but as property values rise in an area that’s actually closer to the downtown core than the south end of Preston Street, it’s anticipating more.