TO 150& BEYOND!
As Canada reaches 2017, its capital is transforming before our eyes, writes Don Butler.
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
As Canada celebrates its sesquicentennial, what lies ahead for the city of Ottawa? In a series of stories starting today, the Citizen will look at how our city and its fabric, its people and its infrastructure will change in the decades ahead. Today, we look at the rail project and the developments on looming on the capital’s horizon. It began life 190 years ago as Bytown, founded to house labourers who had been recruited to build the Rideau Canal. For its first few decades, it was a crude, notoriously lawless frontier settlement.
Even after Queen Victoria chose it as capital of the united Province of Canada in 1857, the renamed city of Ottawa lacked basic municipal services such as paved streets, piped water and sewers.
Lumber, fire and politics shaped its destiny, but not always advantageously. When Allan Gotlieb arrived in 1957 to take up a job at External Affairs, the future Canadian ambassador to the United States was appalled. “An unkempt, decaying village,” he sputtered in his 2006 diplomatic memoir, The Washington Diaries. “To call it provincial would have been a compliment.”
Maclean’s columnist Allan Fotheringham famously dubbed it “the town that fun forgot” and “ennui on the Rideau.” People joked that the best thing about Ottawa was the highway to Montreal. Times have changed. As Canada marks its 150th anniversary of nationhood, Ottawa is a grown-up capital city of nearly a million, on the cusp of changes that will transform it in ways scarcely imaginable to earlier residents.
“We’re going through one of the most significant transformations in our history,” Mayor Jim Watson says.
The pending arrival of light rail transit is responsible for a good part of that. It is expected to change the way we get around, to help revive key downtown streets and to have a profound effect on city development.
Then there’s the unprecedented number of major redevelopments in the works: LeBreton Flats, the islands around Chaudière Falls, the former Canadian Forces Base Rockcliffe, the Oblate lands on Main Street, parts of Natural Resources Canada’s Booth Street complex, Tunney’s Pasture and the shopping centres at Lincoln Fields and Westgate, to name only the most prominent.
“You get a sense there’s energy here and there’s a sense of momentum,” says David Coletto, the youthful CEO of market research firm Abacus Data. A lot of things are changing all at once, he says. “It’s hard for us to imagine what it’s all going to look like when it’s all done.”
Someone told Watson recently that he’d picked a good time to be mayor of Ottawa. “It’s true,” he said. “A lot of these things are finally coming together after years of debate and dithering.”
The result, in many cases, will be entirely new communities inside the Greenbelt, where people will be able to experience the urban planner’s dream trifecta: live, work and play.
Some, such as LeBreton Flats and the adjacent Zibi development, will remake our concept of Ottawa’s downtown. That new west downtown, says Toronto urban designer George Dark, will be “full of amazing things you just would never be able to collect if you started from scratch.” The Ottawa River, Chaudière Falls, the aqueduct that bisects LeBreton Flats and its historic bridges “will all be rediscovered again.”
“We’ve just gone through one of those major periods, where the urban landscape has transformed substantially,” says Ben Gianni, a former director of Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism. “It’s allowed us to get to the point where we can make these next-level investments.”
Some big shifts have happened already. “When I arrived here (in the early 1980s) to go to university, I joked with friends that European cuisine was Swiss Chalet,” Watson says. “Now we have some of the best chefs in the country, and many more multicultural restaurants.”
Jamaican-born Carl Nicholson, executive director of the Catholic Centre for Immigrants, came to Ottawa in 1966. “If I saw another black person on the streets,” he recalls, “I would go over and ask him who he was.”
Half a century later, visible minorities account for nearly one in four city residents. “When I walk into a school,” Watson says. “you’ve got these kids from all over the world, speaking 70-some languages.”
Today’s Ottawa has a completely different rhythm than other Canadian cities, says Dark, who was a member of the design review panel for Lansdowne Park’s redevelopment.
People retire earlier here, often with good government pensions. “It means you have a lot of really smart people retired very early in life. I think that has a lot to do with the way Ottawa is. There’s a quality of life in the city which is quite admirable. It’s an easy place to live.”
The city is still evolving, Dark says, and what it will become 20 years from now is still a bit of a mystery. “Is it a place people would retire to, because of the amazing quality of life?”
When Dark first started to do work in Ottawa, people told him, “I know you come from Toronto. Just don’t expect any of that stuff is ever going to happen here.”
A lot of “that stuff ” is happening now, and more is coming. Brace yourselves.
PEOPLE POWER
About 800,000 people called Ottawa home in 2001, the year the city swallowed surrounding municipalities in a provincially mandated amalgamation. Since then, the population has risen to 975,000, and is projected to reach one million in 2019.
At the request of the provincial government, city officials recently did a population projection for 2036. In 20 years, they said, Ottawa will have more than 1.2 million residents. If you include municipalities on the Quebec side, the population of the entire national capital region will reach 1.8 million — about the size of Vancouver when it hosted Expo 86 and Montreal during Expo 67.
The city has been growing at a faster rate than Ontario or Canada as a whole. That’s projected to continue. By 2036, one in 35 Canadians will call Ottawa home.
Continued growth is critical, Gianni says. “In the end, what transforms cities is population growth, first and foremost,” he says. “Clearly, the foundations are being laid for a large-scale transformation.”
That transformation will occur slowly, over the next 25 years or so, Gianni predicts.
“It’s people who are going to change it. It’s an influx of people, and largely young people. So we have to step back and figure out how that’s going to happen.”
THE LRT EFFECT, PART 1: LIFE IN THE FAST TRACK
The Confederation Line, the 12.5-kilometre, 13-station first phase of Ottawa’s leap into light rail transit, will open in 2018. After that, work will begin almost immediately on the second stage, which will add as many as 36 kilometres of rail and 26 more stations to the network by 2023.
When it’s finished, 70 per cent of Ottawa residents will live within five kilometres of an LRT station. (The exceptions are those who live in suburbs such as Kanata, Stittsville and Barrhaven, or in the city’s sprawling rural areas.) Eventually, city officials hope to extend the LRT to Kanata. Decades from now, a rail link with Gatineau, using the existing Prince of Wales Bridge, is possible as well.
“That will fundamentally change the way we move around Ottawa,” Mayor Jim Watson says. “I anticipate significantly fewer cars when people realize they can hop on the train — every four minutes at rush hour — and be at their destination without fighting bumper-to-bumper traffic.”
From the day it opens in 2018, the Confederation Line is meant to be the most actively used light rail system in North America, with weekday ridership of as many as 250,000 people. Boston, the current leader, has weekday ridership of 232,000 on its LRT Green Line.
The city expects “quite a bump” in transit ridership after the LRT opens, says John Manconi, general manager of the municipal transportation department — at least 10 per cent within the first five years. By 2031, officials expect 143 million passenger trips a year on transit. The number now is about 96 million.
We’ll have, in theory, a much more reliable transit system. Trains and connecting buses will show up frequently during rush hour. No more delays due to traffic in the core: The trains will pass beneath any surface gridlock.
The LRT is expected to shave off between five and 15 minutes on a daily commute to the city’s core. “If you can save someone 10 minutes a day, that’s an hour over the course of the week,” says Coun. Stephen Blais, who chairs the Ottawa Transit Commission. “That’s extra time with your kids, working, doing sports — whatever it is you like to do in your spare time.”
In urban Ottawa, everyone will be within a five-minute walk of a bus that will take them directly to an LRT stop. The LRT will run from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. on weekdays, and stay open an extra hour on Thursday and Friday nights. When the trains do stop, they’ll be replaced by 24-hour bus service.
“People who never take the bus will take an LRT,” says George Dark. “It’s air-conditioned, it’s quiet, it’s incredibly fast. The endto-end duration of your trip is 10, 15, 18 minutes.” Compared to bus transit, he says, “It’s like a microsecond.”
The city is working toward a 5050 split between car trips and more sustainable ways of getting around, such as transit, walking, biking and car pooling. One study suggested that light rail could take 10,000 cars off the road during rush hour by the end of 2023.
There are already encouraging signs, Manconi says. Condo residents are doing more ride sharing, and young adults are moving away from automobile ownership. “They’re doing the math,” Manconi says. “Car ownership’s about $9,000 a year, all in. When you layer in other options, do you really need to own a car?”
The LRT won’t eliminate all cars, Manconi knows. In fact, the city expects the number of driving trips to increase by 21 per cent between 2011 and 2031 as the population grows. “But it’s going to give people that wide swath of options.”
THE LRT EFFECT, PART 2: LIVING ALONG THE LINE
Light rail transit will have a “a big impact on the physical character of the city,” says Katherine Graham, a professor emerita at Carleton University and urban policy expert. She calls LRT systems magnets for intensification.
“You could make the argument that the development potential along the transit line is equal to, if not greater than, the potential along the 400 series of highways from 50 years ago,” says Josh Kardish, manager of land development for Regional Realty. “That’s obviously where the huge opportunities are.”
“A big city will grow around its transit system,” agrees Alain Miguelez, the city’s manager of zoning, intensification and neighbourhoods.
At key stations, such as Bayview, where the Confederation and Trinity LRT lines intersect, the “density” will be off the chart, by Ottawa standards. Trinity Development Group proposes to build three highrise, mixed-use buildings there, each 50 storeys or more. The biggest, at 59 storeys, would be Ottawa’s tallest building — about 130 metres taller than Parliament’s Peace Tower.
But the density will be a lot lower around stations in neighbourhoods farther from the core, says Lee Ann Snedden, the city’s chief of development review services. “We’re trying to design in ways that will be respectful of the existing lower-rise communities but also target that intensification around the transit stations.”
The city has drawn up six transit-focused development plans (around Lees, Hurdman, Tremblay, St. Laurent, Cyrville and Blair stations) and is working on more.
“You’re going to see, over 20 or 30 years, an enormous amount of change in those areas,” Coun. Stephen Blais says. “You’ll have more dense, compact, probably taller planning within a certain circumference of those stations.”
THE LRT EFFECT, PART 3: RECLAIMING DOWNTOWN OTTAWA
The LRT will also make it possible to reclaim some of Ottawa’s key downtown streets. Today, as many as 1,500 buses a day use Slater and Albert streets. That will drop to 400 a day on Slater and to zero on some sections of Albert. On Rideau Street, the torrent of buses will dwindle from 1,200 a day to 550. On showpiece Wellington Street, only 150 buses a day will pass Parliament Hill, down from 600.
“Right now, Slater and Albert are, in essence, the transitway for the downtown,” Watson says. “It’s a pretty bleak tunnel.” Once the LRT opens in June 2018, “I think you’ll see a reinvigoration and revitalization of the downtown core,” he says.
“It will bring back the calm and greater quality of life for people who live, work or shop on those streets.”
The city will begin work on a plan in 2017 to restore life to Slater and Albert, and do the same for the Mackenzie King Bridge and Rideau Street, which will become much more pedestrian-oriented.
Queen Street will be the new “front door to downtown,” city officials say, with bountiful sidewalks that can comfortably accommodate the hundreds of LRT passengers who will emerge from the depths every few minutes during rush hour.
Already, the owners of Queen Street landmarks such as the World Exchange Plaza and the Sun Life Building are talking to the city about major reinvestments, including changes to their facades and entrances to better capture the transit users passing by.
Light rail should also give a boost to the Sparks Street Mall, virtually eliminating parking concerns for potential customers. “From the street level, it will be a much more enjoyable and pleasant city to be in,” Carleton’s Ben Gianni says.
WHERE WE’LL LIVE: OTTAWA GROWING INSIDE-OUT
In the decades ahead, what kind of city will Ottawa be? Will it grow in its suburbs or its inner city?
City planners say there’s room for as much as two-thirds of Ottawa’s new housing stock in the next 20 years in communities outside the Greenbelt. But with development around LRT stations and a spate of new community building projects inside the Greenbelt, “There’s going to be an awful lot of opportunity for growth within that central area,” says Lee Ann Snedden, of the city’s development review services.
“The real action will be within the Greenbelt, rather than in the suburbs,” agrees George Dark, the urban designer. “Boomers want to live in the city instead of big suburban houses and their kids, the baby boom echo, they’re urbanists,” he says. “The postwar doctrine of building suburbs … that’s coming apart really quickly.”
The city has increased its intensification targets over the past five years, and has routinely surpassed them. “So the market demand is there,” Alain Miguelez says.
In part because the population is aging, Miguelez expects city residents to make different housing choices in future, opting increasingly for condos or rental apartments. “We’re not going to see the rate of growth we’ve seen in the past with those large, single detached homes,” he says.
For those who still want singlefamily homes, the resale market may become the main source of supply. “There are thousands of single-family homes being put on the market by people who are making the choice to downsize and move to condominiums,” Miguelez says.
City officials are also seeing a resurgence of homes built to be rental accommodations. “That was sort of invisible five or 10 years ago,” Miguelez says, “and now it’s back on again.” Ottawa already has Canada’s second-highest percentage of tenant households, after Montreal.
Regional Realty’s Josh Kardish has noticed the trend toward rental construction. “You hear of a lot of developers who’ve built condos in the past who are now bringing forward rental towers.”
But he questions whether suburban boomers are really eager to move downtown. “Boomers really have a love for the communities that they live in,” he says. “A lot of them are looking to stay.”
To get them to seriously consider moving away, Kardish says, “They seem to want that complete community right away. They want everything right there.”
There are only a few places like that in central Ottawa now — Westboro, the Glebe, the ByWard Market — but many more are in the pipeline. New communities will appear in places such as LeBreton Flats and the former Rockcliffe airbase. And, as we build them, people will come.
BETTER OR WORSE?
Safe to say, Ottawa will change — a lot — in the next decade or two. There will be underground trains, bicycle tracks along major streets, gleaming new neighbourhoods filled with towering buildings and innumerable places to buy highend coffee. (OK, so not everything will change ...)
There’ll be more superb bars and restaurants, new parks, cultural institutions and hot neighbourhoods, more people with skin that isn’t white, driverless vehicles roaming the streets like riderless horses and old people everywhere you look.
But will it be a better place to live?
“You need a futurist to give you an answer to that,” says the NCC’s Mark Kristmanson. Or maybe a soothsayer. “I think the makings are there to do it,” Kristmanson says. “We have an incredible public realm that’s not yet at its full potential. There’s such strength in the basic knowledge assets of the community, and strength in the institutions of our universities, the federal institutions.”
Ottawa will become a more interesting place as it attracts more visible minorities, says Carleton University’s Katherine Graham. “We don’t want to white-bread the capital,” she says. “We do need to recognize the fact that the city is becoming more diverse. That’s a very healthy, good thing.
“Is Ottawa aspiring to be a Toronto or a Vancouver in miniature, going higher and higher?” Graham asks. “I think there will be continuing conflicts on those questions.”
Jack McCarthy, who watched the city evolve during his 27 years as head of the Somerset West Community Health Centre, is optimistic.
“Ottawa’s got a highly educated population,” he says. “They’re not going to stand for mediocrity. They want to be engaged in their communities. That building of social capital, I think, is strong in this city and will get stronger.
“We have to make sure we elect civic politicians who appreciate the value of social capital and being innovative and entrepreneurial in the best sense of that word,” McCarthy says. “Now’s not the time to be risk averse.”
Pollster David Coletto has no doubts about his adopted home’s future. “As this city transitions into really a modern city, with a modern transportation spine and all these great amenities and activities,” he says, “Ottawa’s going to be a different place. You’ve got the fundamentals for greatness.” dbutler@postmedia.com twitter.com/ButlerDon