Views from the core
Jessie Smith
Living downtown with her family gives this architect unique insight into what the area needs
How long have you lived downtown? Jessie: My husband and I moved to Centretown during grad school in 2009. Then, after returning to Ottawa from studying abroad, we moved downtown again. Unfortunately, between 2016 and 2020 we had to move out of our house because our landlord was selling. We ended up a little outside of the downtown core, which we didn’t enjoy very much. We missed being close to everything. We hated that we had to get into a car to drive anytime we wanted to go grocery shopping or to a coffee shop, though we did have a really beautiful park. So we moved back in 2020 and we’ve been very happy since.
What do you enjoy about the location? It’s the walkability. We walk our kids to Elgin Street Public School and then we walk to work and then we walk back and pick them up and we walk home. Just having that daily exercise and getting out in the community is so much better than commuting by car. It’s our dream lifestyle.
What would you like to see improved? We love all the homes that are over 100 years old, and some of them are being really well maintained. But some are falling apart due to lack of maintenance over the years. Often they’re divided into multiple rental units that provide low-cost housing — which is great and I don’t think that should change. But it would be really nice to see some sort of program by the city to help landlords make improvements to those properties without having to increase rental rates. There are a lot of properties in decline in the neighbourhood and it would be really great to see them maintained while also keeping diverse populations in the neighborhood. We love the diversity of the neighbourhood. We love the people. There’s a thriving Buy-Nothing group that keeps us more sustainable.
The only other thing I would change would be for kids activities. I find often they have a Kanata location and an Orleans location and maybe one in the south that they call the central location, but there aren’t as many opportunities downtown for a range of kids activities.
What project(s) or issues are you paying attention to?
There’s a lot of government funding being promised for housing, but even once that funding is allocated it takes two to three years for new construction and renovation projects to get from the planning stage to construction completion, and then there’s a process of getting people into the units. You need to get the commitment of funding for these projects, but we also need more shortterm solutions to affordable living in the existing housing stock.
And the other issue is the availability of childcare. Again, funding for childcare centres has been promised, but we still haven’t seen that actually distributed. I was on the board of our daycare for a couple of years and I also do some work as an architect for childcare centres. So I have a little bit of insight on this. The funding is so piecemeal and even when it’s distributed sometimes it’s clawed back; it’s so hard for providers to plan for improvements. I know it’s really hard for the providers to commit to new projects, but it’s really important because it’s also difficult for young families to find childcare close to home.
As for affordable housing, I feel like we’ve been fairly privileged, but even we’ve had struggles. People need proper places to live. During the pandemic we saw an increase in people out on the streets — they need more support. We need to give back to our community. We need to help people get into proper housing because that’s going to contribute to their overall well-being and health.
We’re seeing a lot of new infill projects in the neighbourhood, which I think is great. We’re seeing some mixed-use buildings, with businesses on the ground floor and residential units above. I think those are going to really help to enliven the commute on Somerset and Gladstone.