More imagination, fewer rules would help city planning

Ottawa needs more mature understanding of our growth

The replacement of the Ontario Municipal Board with a new, less powerful, appeal body is being widely hailed as a long overdue improvement that will place the responsibility for planning squarely in the hands of city councillors and planning bureaucrats.

The news would be even better if these weren’t exactly the same people who have brought us little but uninspired condo towers and ridiculously dense suburbs in a city awash in land. Although new-home buyers pay the bill for much of the city’s growth through development charges, meeting their needs is not paramount. At city hall, Job One is to design a city that fits the philosophical outlook of planners and the majority of councillors.

The latest big idea is that as many of us as possible should move to new condo buildings close to the city’s multibillion-dollar light rail system. There, we can live in 600-square-foot apartments, do without a car and meet all of our transportation needs by travelling only to those destinations served by the new rail line.

This despite the fact that Ottawa’s condo market is already vastly overbuilt and there are years of inventory in stock in existing or approved buildings.

The one little wrinkle as we wait for buyers to equal the wisdom of city planners is that intensification is popular in theory, but not on one’s own street. Most development controversies in Ottawa have to do with the location and height of buildings in already-developed areas.

In the past, city councillors have had the option of blaming those tall buildings on the developer-friendly OMB, saying that their hands are tied. Councillors’ hands are tied, but they were the ones with the rope.

Elected people make all the planning rules in Ontario. The provincial government sets the broad planning policies for municipalities. City planners write official plans and secondary plans in accordance with those principles. Those plans are approved by city councillors.

The idea that the shortfalls in Ottawa’s development are largely due to the OMB forcing bad development ideas on the public is largely a myth. There is pretty much no chance of a development being approved if it doesn’t line up with city and provincial planning rules.

The real problem is a lack of public understanding of how those rules work. The city’s official plan is a document to guide growth, not restrict it. Ottawa is legally obligated to prepare a plausible plan to house an expanding population. Freezing the urban boundaries or rejecting intensification, while popular, are not feasible.

People often refer to development approvals as breaking the city’s zoning laws or violating its community design plans, but those documents are guidelines, not fixed laws. Even the official plan is a set of broad principles, not a catalogue of rules.

While the public thinks it is somehow disenfranchised, the reality is that city hall controls even the smallest details of how Ottawa develops. Local builders can be rightly criticized for producing a lot of boring product, but they are working within a template that pleases politicians and bureaucrats, not home buyers.

Ottawa needs a more mature understanding of how a city grows.

Mayor Jim Watson has been talking since 2012 about how desirable it is to have predictability and certainty in development. And yet, a city is ever-changing. Can we really predict what Ottawa should look like decades from now?

Federal government bureaucrats thought they could do that in the middle of the last century. The result was a Greenbelt that has failed to contain growth and has made our city more sprawling and costly to service.

Ottawa’s real problem is not how planning approvals are appealed, but that much of what is deemed acceptable is bland and not attuned to home buyers’ needs. Strict government regulation and a limited pool of builders make it tough to tell Orléans from Barrhaven or Kanata.

More imagination and fewer rules would make a better city.