The NCC is considering revamping the scale of the planned neighbourhood at its LeBreton Flats project site.
National Capital Commission officials are hinting that residential development in their LeBreton Flats project will be built with greater density than previously planned, a revamping of the scale of the planned neighbourhood that could prove controversial.
In an interview with local media in August, the NCC’s vice-president of capital planning, François Lapointe, said the commission will be revisiting its LeBreton plans, possibly changing the density of future residential projects in the downtown development.
That could mean buildings would be built taller or denser than initially envisioned. So far, the NCC hasn't said which parts of the current plans may be revised.
“At this time, it would be premature to comment furthermore since the redesign process has not been defined yet,” says NCC spokesman Mario Tremblay.
The current scheme for the project, set in 2005, set the tallest building heights at 12 storeys. However, a contentious development trend in Ottawa’s central area has residential projects going higher and higher. Plans for the escarpment area just southeast of the LeBreton Flats call for buildings up to 23 storeys in height.
Michael Powell, president of the Dalhousie Community Association, hopes that the NCC will think more creatively than adding more floors onto their blueprints.
“When we’re looking at density, there’s more than one way of doing it,” he says.
He points to the neighbourhood that existed on the Flats before the land was expropriated by the federal government in the 1960s. “It was a very dense, urban, neighbourhood.”
Powell says that providing a variety of housing options – including townhouse-style units rather than just condominiums – is vital if the community wants to keep families in the downtown area.
He says he also hoped the NCC and developers would include housing options that would be affordable to the middle class.
“There needs to be some kind of human scale, that might mean stacked town homes and low to mid-rise developments that provide a variety of choices.”
Current plans, agreed upon by the NCC and the City of Ottawa, aim to get up to 25 per cent of all units at the LeBreton Flats development to meet the city’s affordable housing requirements.
“(It) might require being a little bit creative, but the one advantage we have is that it’s been 50 years, and so we’ve (waited) for a long time,” Powell says. “It’s so important to get it right and there’s an opportunity to do that.”
Centretown Citizens Community Association vice-president Robert Dekker worried that this would be another example of the city allowing a developer – in this case the NCC – to modify existing zoning requirements.
“We see that in many cases, and we’ve seen it with buildings that are going up in Centretown, that we have zoning and then we have what is actually permitted to be built,” Dekker says.
In August 2012, the CCCA appealed a city council decision to amend zoning bylaws to allow the construction of a condo building on Nepean Street, saying the development didn’t meet the Centretown guidelines. It settled the appeal with the city and the developer in February.
“If there’s one thing that, really, the people in Ottawa are tired of, it’s (that) we have bylaws, we know what the heights are supposed to be, but something else gets put in,” Dekker says.
Marica Clarke, the City of Ottawa's program manager for land use, says increases to the height limits at LeBreton Flats may be possible. She says a change could only happen after an official plan amendment is approved. Any adjustment would have to go through council and potentially be subject to an appeal.
Clarke said any height increase would have to comply with a view-protection policy aimed at ensuring Parliament Hill remains visible from the Ottawa River Parkway.
LeBreton Flats has been in a state of flux since the 1960s, when a century-old working-class community was razed by the NCC to create space for what was meant to be a complex of federal government buildings.
Those buildings were never built, partly because of soil contamination left over from the industrial sites that occupied the area since the mid-19th century.
The lands were unoccupied until 2005, when the Canadian War Museum opened in the north section of the Flats.
Since then, two condo buildings have been opened in the area two more are currently under construction.
“What’s been there so far is, I think, universally seen as a little underwhelming,” Powell says.