While Centretown’s population has been stagnant since the 1950s, city planners are expecting the community’s population to grow by 50 per cent by 2031, adding an additional 10,000 residents.
Looking to the future the city, along with urban designers and community leaders is working to create a community design plan that will coordinate development, transit, services, and urban design to maintain Centretown’s strengths and improve its weaknesses.
However, the population boost will not affect all of Centretown equally. Despite the community’s overall stagnant population, mid-Centretown has experienced a dramatic increase in its housing stock. Defined as the areas between Kent and Cartier Streets and Gloucester Street and the 417, mid-Centretown’s housing grew from 4,000 in 1951 to 8,000 in 2006, mainly due to intensification.
This is the area where city staff expect most of Centretown’s future residents to call home. In order to accommodate the new growth the city recognized the need to update the 33-year old official plan for the community.
While Somerset Ward Coun. Diane Holmes says the plan worked extremely well in the past, but the community is plagued by inconsistent zoning and constant exemptions to developers by the Ontario Municipal Board.
In the mid-Centretown area there are 14 different zoning land use classifications, 12 different height allowances, eight split zoning locations, and a myriad of restrictions on commercial development.
Holmes says plans like this work because given the right information most developers will work with the city. “I’m optimistic because a process like this will enable residents to tell developers what they want and what they will accept. I’m looking forward to good things,” says Holmes.
Urban Designer Ross Burnett, with Urban Strategies, the company the city contracted to produce the community design, says the current policy is “a bylaw of exceptions.”
In order to ease Centretown’s growing pains, Urban Strategies hosted a public consultation Tuesday night to introduce the design plan’s objectives and receive community input in what the company’s director calls “the very front end of this.”
“Napoleon always said that it was better to attack than defend and that’s what we’re doing, better to fight about it now rather than in the end,” says Dark.
He says the challenge in creating a design plan for Centretown is that it reflects a patchwork of periods and that the most recent trend in development is tall dense buildings that don’t necessarily fit with the community.
“There’s this idea that if someone can get their hands on any part of Centretown it can be intensified but the reality is that it can’t,” says Dark.
He says the most likely area to experience intensification through tall apartment buildings is the north-east Elgin Street area.
The design company identified several of Centretown’s strengths including its diversity of architecture, lifestyles and income, surrounding green space, walkability, workability, and heritage. Residents in attendance agreed with the designers that the community’s growth should not come at the expense of these strengths.
However they also zeroed in on some challenges that negatively affect Centretown such as the divisive effect of the north-south arterial routes, lack of central green space, parking scarcity, and several dwarfing developments currently in the works.
Admitting that Centretown defies definition, Dark characterizes mid-Centretown as a community of apartments, citing the fact that 96 per cent of its residents live in multi-unit dwellings. He also says that the design would strive to preserve the three and four-storey apartment buildings that line Centretown streets.
Dark predicts that the focus of immediate development will be Centretown’s numerous surface parking lots, and says he expects them to disappear within 15 years.
The final design is expected to be finished by Spring 2011. In the meantime Urban Strategies will be hosting four more public meetings, five days of stakeholder meetings, and one more community event.