By Keely Grasser
City Hall Bureau
A Centretown citizens’ group is concerned that new city-wide zoning bylaws will change the low-profile neighbourhood they’ve fought for, but detractors say they welcome change because the group’s anti-business attitude has hurt the area’s commercial growth.
The Centretown Citizen’s Community Association (CCCA) is the driving force between the 30-year-old Centretown Plan, which encourages storey restrictions for new buildings and redevelopment of older ones, among other things.
The CCCA says the new zoning plan, due out for public consultation in May, is the city’s attempt to rid itself of these existing community plans and allow for more intense development — something they don’t want to see happen in Centretown.
The plan was originally a response to developments in the 1970s, when Centretown was seeing a lot of “torn down paradise, paved to put up a parking lot,” says Brian Bourns, chairman of the Centretown Citizen’s Planning Committee.
Increased traffic, high rises and the deterioration of older buildings prompted citizens to create a community group that worked with the city to create the Centretown Plan.
What the plan’s goals came down to was a choice between livability and profitability, says John Leaning, an architect and planner who worked on forming it.
“The clearest message I got was that livability was the most important thing,” he said at a March 30 neighbourhood forum.
The debate-style meeting, held at city hall, attracted about 150 Centretown citizens and community representatives.
Favouring livability didn’t evoke a good response from Centretown’s business sector, said Leaning. “Their silence was deafening.”
This is where the Centretown Plan fails, said several detractors.
Barry Nabatian, general manager of the Market Research Corp., accuses the CCCA of having an anti-business attitude, which hasn’t endeared the group to the commercial sector.
“As soon as they’re demonized, why should they participate?” he said.
Alan Cohen, a lawyer from the Centretown area, points to the Bank Street corridor as a failure and a sign of serious infrastructure problems.
“I don’t know anyone who would walk down Bank Street for the pleasure of it,” said Leaning. “Quite frankly, it’s a disaster,” says resident Jim Hayes, adding that it’s embarrassing that in 30 years, not one developer has come forward with something creative and beautiful for the area.
“It’s dirty … there’s no sense of beauty,” added Nabatian.
The CCCA disagrees. They recently released a report card, giving the plan a B plus in its 30 years of operation. Good grades were granted in most areas, like residential character, traffic, and quality housing, but poor grades were handed out for pollution and parking.
“For the most part, the plan has really done what it was set out to do,” says city planner Dennis Jacobs.
The city’s planning department is working on the new plan, which will be revealed next month.
Jacob says the city is using the existing community plans to help form the new one. But CCCA says it feels endangered, especially since it says the plan has been attacked lately by spot re-zoning where the city lifts regulations in individual cases.
This is in part because of a newly formed review panel for Centretown developments, which is not bound by the community plan.
The CCCA is calling Centretown citizens to arms, saying that the new zoning-bylaw may mean more of this, and wants residents to be prepared to defend the community during the public consultation process, beginning in May.
Jacobs warned at the meeting that zoning bylaws aren’t meant to maintain the status quo. “It’s meant to keep stable communities stable,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll stay the same.”