With highrise condos becoming the defining vision for the future of Preston Street, a shadow has been cast over the fate of Little Italy’s lowrise buildings.
But concerned residents say a solution to the problem could be as easy as drawing a line.
The premise is simple: draw a line around a batch of lowrise homes and give developers the green light to build newer, taller buildings outside that perimeter.
“It’s a way of protecting the low-ise residential areas from having an 18-storey building rise directly up from their backyard,” says Kitchissippi Coun. Katherine Hobbs.
Faced with a similar problem in her ward, Hobbs successfully implemented the first-ever “neighbourhood line” in Ottawa for the recently approved community design plan for Scott Street.
“Wherever you have said, ‘OK you can have some height,’ that height will then be guided by a 45-degree angle of transition into the next structure beside it,” explains Hobbs.
The measure forces developers to acknowledge that only areas outside the line are fit for medium and highrise buildings, and that lowrise residential neighbourhoods cannot be surrounded by towering condos.
In the current climate of intense urbanization, over-intensification is a very real fear among lowrise neighbourhoods. Hobbs says the move will ease the fears of residents living in lowrise homes and will ensure a balance is achieved in the built environment.
After successfully including it in Scott Street’s community plan, Hobbs rallied the support of the planning committee that passed a motion in January for neighbourhood lines to be considered by city planners in other projects.
Little Italy is part of a small area that is currently the most concentrated area of condominium development in Ottawa. Ten high-rise projects are in various stages of construction in the area, the most prominent being the 45-storey Claridge Icon project on the corner of Preston and Carling.
“I’m very interested in protecting our neighbourhoods on the Kitchissippi side of the Little Italy area, and it would be really nice if they could do it everywhere,” Hobbs says.
While Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes has accepted the development of highrise condos on Carling, she has also supported lowrise neighbourhoods north of Carling, disagreeing with several high-ise projects that have been proposed in the area.
For Joe Cotroneo, vice-chairman of the Preston Street BIA, the smattering of homes on the side streets either side of Preston Street are the main areas that need to be protected.
“These little residential houses are very important to the neighbourhood,” he says. “We really want to protect these little side-street neighbourhoods and the traditional main street.”
Cotroneo was born and raised in Little Italy and says that with all the developments in the area, it’s important for a cultural district like Little Italy to be preserved.
“There’s a bit of a fine line,” he says. “Cultural districts are important to a city because they draw tourists and when you look at it, there’s just Little Italy and Chinatown. It’s very important to protect them.”
Randolph Wang is the city planner overseeing the community plan for the Preston-Carling district. He says that while a neighbourhood line has been proposed in the Preston-Carling district plan for the area west of the O-Train, it might not be possible to replicate what took place on Scott Street because of the differences in land uses in the two areas.
“There are significant differences in context between the Scott Street area and the Preston-Carling district,” he said.
Wang says that along with a neighbourhood line, a number of different policies with respect to built-form transition will be introduced in the draft of the secondary plan, which is set to be presented on Feb. 25 for discussion at a public information session.
The final draft of the secondary plan will be presented to the planning committee and city council for approval in May.