WAKING UP THE NEIGHBOURS
Angry Sandy Hill residents say students are taking over and if the city, the University of Ottawa and landlords don’t step up, the character of the neighbourhood will be lost. DEREK SPALDING reports.
In the final part of his series City of Noise, Derek Spalding looks at Sandy Hill, where the parties never stop.
The party had dwindled to a mere murmur by 5:30 a.m. Two hours later, on a Sunday morning in late August, Evan Gould and a couple of his roommates walked outside to send home the last few stragglers still lingering in the driveway. For some, this was the party to end the summer; for others, it was the end of an era. In the past four years, anywhere from five to seven people have shared the house at 169 Stewart St., which became affectionately known as The Brotel.
The three-storey brick house was the best place to party in Sandy Hill, say the regulars. With an open-door policy, anybody could come and join the festivities, just as long as they were respectful of others.
But after this latest bash, Gould and his roommates were moving on, leaving the Brotel and the party life behind them. So they made their last hurrah one to remember.
Gould took over the DJ table by midnight. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt — he and his roommates often wore them at their parties — he mixed tracks at volume levels typically reserved for small raves.
Scaffolding was brought in to hold the lighting system for the laser show and strobe lights that flashed through a thick fog bursting from the smoke machine. In front of Gould, dancers twisted their bodies wildly on one side of the room, while spectators watched a rambunctious beer pong tournament on the other half.
Outside, the neighbours could hear the bass and muffled shouting, even with the door closed. When the door opened, as it did often as people spilled into the backyard, the music and yelling easily travelled to the street and beyond the back fence.
This kind of party noise, as city bylaw officers call it, is commonplace in Sandy Hill, a vibrant neighbourhood with vast park space and trails running along the Rideau Canal. By day, the sidewalks are busy with students, families and seniors, but on any given night, the parties take over. As a result, the residents find themselves in a fight to preserve the character of their neighbourhood — and their sanity.
They want nearby University of Ottawa to build more on-campus residences, they want the city to ban housing conversions that allow dozens of students to cram into one home, and they want more enforcement of the noise bylaw.
But they’ve been asking for these things for years, without much success.
“There is a sense that this is a neighbourhood that doesn’t belong to anybody except the students, or at least the students have that attitude and other people are starting to have it, too,” said Masood Qureshi, who has lived in Sandy Hill for nine years with his family. “The city has washed its hands and let the university take over.”
Residents are fighting back on several fronts, and are not shy about sounding off to authorities. According to a Citizen analysis of about 68,000 noise complaints received by the city since 2008, more than 53,000 calls were for loud music and shouting and 12,000 of those were made in the Rideau-Vanier ward, which encompasses Sandy Hill, alone.
Several blocks in the neighbourhood sit at the top of the list for having the most reports of parties. While partiers at The Brotel brag that police came to the home 27 times last year and visits from bylaw officers were too many to count, the 100-block of Stewart, which has triggered 153 complaints in the past five years, is far from the worst. That honour goes to the 100-block of Goulburn Avenue, with 354 complaints in the past five years, followed by the 100-block of Lees Avenue with 330 complaints and the 300-block of Chapel with 329.
The numbers don’t surprise residents. Qureshi and his wife, Leanne Moussa, have been dealing with parties on Goulburn every week for years. For them, and many of their neighbours, the noise problem is exacerbated by what they see as a lack of enforcement from city bylaw officers. Moussa said there are nights when she calls bylaw repeatedly, but officers take hours to arrive or don’t respond until the next day.
“The bottom line is the city’s not enforcing the bylaw,” she said.
“I’m amazed that there are always enough bylaw officers to give out parking tickets, but when it comes to anything else, there’s just not enough.”
City bylaw chief Linda Anderson says a team of 12 bylaw officers can respond to about 40 addresses a shift, but that falls well short of what is required some nights.
In 2012, there were 72 days with more than 50 complaints. Of those, 18 had more than 80 complaints and seven had more than 100. However, multiple calls are often made for one party.
Of the 63 calls from the 100-block of Goulburn in 2012, 42 were for unique dates and up to five calls were recorded in one night.
The city could not provide information for the number of inspections conducted across the city or the number of tickets issued, which is an issue for all bylaw complaints and a point highlighted in the annual Ontario Municipal Benchmarking Initiative. Ottawa does not provide data for inspections, nor does it provide data on compliance levels.
There have been nights when bylaw officers can’t inspect all complaints, but to combat that problem, Anderson’s office has implemented annual overtime blitzes between the start of September and the end of October. Up to 10 teams of two officers are on weekend duty to crack down on the wild student parties that kick off the new school year.
Moussa and her neighbours say they have a better chance of getting a response if more people complain. They also say that bylaw officers urge them to call repeatedly when the noise gets out of hand.
‘There is a sense that this is a neighbourhood that doesn’t belong to anybody except the students, or at least the students have that attitude and other people are starting to have it, too. The city has washed its hands and let the university take over.’ MASOOD MASOOD QURESHI QURESHI Resident Resident of of Sandy Sandy Hill Hill for for nine nine years years
“We’re told that’s what we’re supposed to do, so that’s what we do, but there’ve been instances where we’ve gone down and dealt with it ourselves,” she said. “I’ve written letters, saying ... either you enforce the bylaws or we’re going to deal with it ourselves and then you’re going to have bigger issues on your hands because it’s confrontational and there’s lots of alcohol involved at that time of night.”
But for Moussa and her neighbours, better enforcement of the bylaw isn’t the only thing they want. With the rapid increase in housing conversions in the area, they say U of O needs to build more on-campus housing.
The university owns enough residences to house 2,994 students, but with an estimated 9,500 new arrivals every year, school officials admit they need more.
Currently, U of O’s housing services targets first-year students and does not provide residence for senior students unless the spaces are not taken up by those arriving on campus for the first time.
“We definitely don’t have enough to meet our needs,” said Michelle Juilbeault, director of housing services.
The school is in the midst of a master plan that will consider where new residences could be built on campus, but it’s not a sure thing that the process, which is expected to be completed in the next 18 months, will result in any new spaces because of competing factors, such as the need for more classrooms.
“We remain optimistic, but there’s no guarantee,” Juilbeault said.
In the meantime, the school has a goal to create 1,000 more student-housing spaces. But without the ability to build on campus, there are discussions about turning to the private sector to build off-campus housing in the surrounding community.
For Sandy Hill residents, that’s no solution.
Rideau-Vanier ward Coun. Mathieu Fleury agrees with them. He says the university has plenty of options to build on property the school already owns.
“If they were smart, they’d build on these lands on King Edward because who’s going to complain on King Edward? It’s them, it’s the university,” Fleury said. “They could increase the density, make it student housing and the community would be really happy.”
Some streets have had an entire block of single-family homes converted to higher-density student housing. Where semi-detached homes used to house four or five family members, a conversion of the same property can cram together 20 or 30 students.
The entire block of Osgoode Street, between Henderson and Nelson streets, is a prime example, Fleury said during a recent walk through the neighbourhood. In the main foyer of nearly every converted home on Osgoode are four or five mailboxes indicating the number of suites inside. Each of those units will have more than one student, said Fleury.
Up until this year, when city council temporarily banned all new conversion applications in several wards, property owners could easily transform houses without having to adhere to Ottawa’s updated infill regulations that specifically outline rules for how the property is designed.
The rules did not apply to conversions, which made it easier for owners to increase the number of units on one site.
“We need to align the rules around conversions with the actual infill goals,” said Fleury. “If you do that, then the discussion about noise is related to students, landlords and the (parties) because you remove the shell of the building being an issue.”
For some, that debate will come too late.
Randy Innes spent years renovating his home on Russell, a short street once filled with working professionals, young children and senior citizens.
He and his wife, Janice Bernstein, had two children during the 12 years they lived at 158 Russell, but the demographic makeup of the street is changing.
It began when a few homes were converted to multi-unit rentals, and the loud parties started and garbage piled up on the street and in their yard.
Across the street, parties regularly got out of hand at a house that was, at the time, the official party shack for the Jockey Club, a group established by former U of O student Steven Baker-Findlay to raise school spirit by supporting athletic teams on game days.
The club organized tailgate parties at football games until Baker-Findlay bought the property on Russell and made it the official headquarters to kickoff pre-game parties.
Innes and his neighbours had a problem when people would line up outside the house, openly drinking and urinating on people’s lawns. He says he was chased away several times after asking the partiers to be respectful of neighbours. His home was also egged and vandalized on several occasions.
Those parties no longer take place at the house, says Baker-Findlay. He still rents the home to about six students, who may have their own noise issues, but the Jockey Club has evolved and now the pre-game parties that can easily attract 300 people are held elsewhere.
“The people who live there might party themselves, but there’s never been an official Jockey Club party there for the past three years,” said Baker-Findlay, who recognizes that some of his guests may have taken complaints from neighbours into their own hands. “I can say that no one from my house would (vandalize his home). There might have been someone who came to our parties who did it, but I would have no idea who it was.”
The tipping point for Innes and Bernstein came when the other half of their semi-detached home was converted into a multi-unit rental and about nine students moved in.
“That was the end of it,” said Innes. “The noise is an annual affair. There’s no memory in a transient community, so we had to start every year anew. The last year was just unbearable.”
Innes and Bernstein sold their house in June. It too was quickly carved up into multiple units, which also now house students.
The trend is transforming the neighbourhood, says Celine Bak, who lives on Russell just a block away. People come in, buy up a property, convert it to student rentals and force the neighbours to put up with the noise and the mess of a transient student population. Then other residents get fed up and leave, too.
Her husband, Antonio CazorlaSanchez, says he’s frustrated with landlords who pay no more in property taxes than he does, despite the income they’re drawing, and live in the suburbs where they don’t have to deal with the problems.
“They get the money, we get the noise,” he said. “They don’t live in the neighbourhood and we’re the ones who deal with the problems. We like our neighbourhood, but our neighbourhood is being stolen from us.”
Recognizing the trend in housing conversions, the city has since put a hold on all such projects until council can reconcile differences between infill guidelines for new builds that are not in line with rules for converting properties into multi-unit rentals. But even when those changes have been made, the city needs to find a way to restrict the number of conversions, says Innes.
“The city is kidding itself if it thinks the moratorium on conversions and the changes to the rules are going to limit the conversions,” Innes said.
Until conversions are kept in check, noise will always be a problem, say residents. Students come and go and yet the party issues continue, said Moussa. To her, that signifies the landlords are not policing their own properties and the city has not created rules that target absentee landlords.
“I can clearly tell you that it’s the same problematic properties even when the tenants change,” Moussa said. “There’s obviously a systemic problem.”
Before Gould and his friends took over The Brotel, the house had long been known for parties and some don’t expect that to change with new tenants.
During the final end-of-an-era party in August, a visitor, who would only identify herself as Robyn, said the tradition is likely to carry on.
“It’s going to be a frat house, is what I’ve heard,” she said. “If people thought this was loud, frats do not give a s--t, so good luck with that, neighbours.”