College Coun. Laine Johnson is advocating for the province to stop undermining municipal governments and let city planners do their work to help create as much new housing as possible in liveable neighbourhoods.
Citing 53 recommendations that the city has made to accelerate housing development, Johnson said the provincial government is ‘punching down’ on the city’s ability to build housing.
“I think that there are certain aspects of local planning that are worthy of preserving,” Johnson said. “I don’t want (city planners) to have to spend more time responding to provincial changes than they are actually doing the work for the residents of Ottawa.”
In a July Facebook post, Johnson called out the current Progressive Conservative provincial government for interfering far too much with coherent municipal planning processes.
“Over the past four years, the Government of Ontario has gradually removed the autonomy of cities to shape their future. Bill after bill, they’ve increased the number of units that can replace any single family home. They’ve reduced setbacks, so buildings can be closer to the street. They’ve ordered changes to the Official Plan (including expanding the urban boundary) and ordered changes to the zoning by-law,” Johnson wrote.
“Most recently,” she added, “they began to water down Secondary Plans, which cities have used to holistically design neighbourhoods that are slated for significant growth. This has been a tremendous blow to how you want to have your voice heard as your area grows. The City of Ottawa has had no choice but to fall in line. By law, our own by-laws and plans have to follow the requirements set by the province.”
Johnson described the work of city planners increasingly resembling that of permit approval stampers for housing projects on a lot-by-lot basis, rather than developing forward-looking, holistic secondary plans that involve public consultation.
“Without leaving cities the ability to plan holistically … we risk not being able to plan for the other things that make a neighbourhood liveable,” she wrote.
Secondary plans consider a subdivision’s growth, its impact on traffic, its commercial and institutional needs such as stores, schools, and parks, and other pressures such as its distance from nearby amenities and commute times.
Johnson said the infill approach focuses more on the number of units per parcel of land and less on the surrounding community and the needs of neighbouring residents who would prefer a comprehensive and transparent planning process.
“Individual lots may not recognize what livability they would offer if they were held to account across many different lots that front a main street,” Johnson said.
The province’s recent Bill 98 mandates that municipalities no longer have the authority to impose zoning standards related to minimum lot areas, lot frontages or lot depth on urban residential land, intending to encourage smaller lot sizes over time, according to a June article by the Toronto-based law firm Aird Berlis.
The minimum lot size of 175 square metres, according to the firm, only allows for a single-unit townhouse and puts pressure on services and infrastructure such as roads or water/sewage systems.
“The disparity between the proposed minimum lot area of 175 square metres and lot areas (for other types of housing) suggests a very real impact on area character if municipalities are not afforded flexibility in its application,” the firm wrote.
However, intensification is a priority for future growth, particularly because continuing to expand out puts pressure on the city’s roads as more people must commute farther for work and many local services.
For example, both Johnson and Orléans South-Navan Coun. Catherine Kitts, have said backed-up traffic is a key frustration in their wards.
In Johnson’s case, residents from outer communities such as Barrhaven and Kanata use College Ward, a suburban area between the outskirts and downtown, as a corridor to get to work, jamming up local roads.
“I can assure you that my residents in Nepean are deeply resentful of Barrhaven because (commuters) clog up their streets. They don’t shop anywhere. Those neighbourhoods have stayed stagnant because nobody is building there,” she explained, noting that heavy traffic lowers their livability and cuts off local investment. “That’s why I want housing built where I am” instead of beyond the Greenbelt, the NCC-controlled ring of undeveloped land that separates central Ottawa from the city’s outer suburbs and rural areas.
In Kitts’s case, her ward is growing faster than the roads connecting it to the city can handle.
“If you abandon comprehensive planning in favour of a lot-by-lot approach, you risk creating the transportation bottlenecks, infrastructure deficits, and communities that are already present in Orléans South today,” Kitts said in an e-mailed statement to Capital Current.
Rob Attrell, an urbanism consultant with Strong Towns Ottawa, said both secondary plans and lot-by-lot processes are subject to obstacles that delay new housing construction.
“Whether it happens one by one or with a giant area rezoning is less important than getting rid of the bureaucracy involved with either of those steps,” he said.
One example is the stalled construction of a tower at 1357 Baseline Road. Originally planned as a retirement residence, according to Ontario Construction News, it is currently under a site plan renewal process for its new designation as residential apartments after the site’s ownership changed, with no firm date of when construction can resume.
Attrell said a constructive, priority-driven approach should inform city planning that takes public consultation into account while making more housing non-negotiable, medium-density and evenly distributed.
Attrell noted that universal opposition to infill developments results in blocks levelled for high-rises instead of medium-density mixed-use units.
“Nobody wants an entire block to be under construction all at once . . . but at the same time, if you stall and you don’t allow any construction or any new small apartment-type buildings, what you end up with is the only place you can build any housing are in towers, one-offs that do take this lot-by-lot approach,” Attrell said.
Another benefit, according to Attrell, is that medium-density developments allow spaces for small-scale businesses, improving a neighbourhood’s walkability.
“If you’re going to build a three-storey building on a suburban lot, let’s say you buy two suburban lots next to each other, have a bakery, have room for a restaurant or something on the ground floor . . . . The more commercial spaces, the more things you can do that people would otherwise have to drive for that you can put within walking distance,” he said.
In the city’s draft growth management strategy, which projects growth to 2051, urban intensification is a priority, with a goal of increasing it by 51 per cent. This would mean more medium- and high-density housing builds, especially around transit corridors, and it would lessen the need for outward suburban expansion.
However, various sources suggest the housing market prefers suburban single-family housing, which works against the lot-by-lot approach of approving infills the province has been encouraging.
“Without leaving cities the ability to plan holistically, we risk not being able to plan for the other things that make a neighbourhood liveable.”
— College Coun. Laine Johnson
In her post, Johnson remarked that despite the city approving a lot of permits for infill developments, little is getting built unless it’s beyond the Greenbelt.
“It might be other financial reasons, but we do still see people building on the outskirts,” she said. “For councillors like Catherine Kitts and (Stittsville’s) Glen Gower, they don’t want more suburbs because they can’t get people into the city in the first place.”
In a July 6 news release, the Ottawa Real Estate Board said that single family homes accounted for the largest share of market activity in June at 879 sales, while apartment-style properties only had 178 sales.
“Single-family demand has been steadier, while townhomes and especially apartments have carried more of the market softness,” the release said.
In the draft growth management strategy, market demand is also described as favouring single family homes to apartment-based housing, meaning intensifying developed communities with towers to achieve the intensification goal wouldn’t guarantee residents moving in while negatively affecting housing affordability.
The report concludes instead that the most pragmatic approach to urban intensification is to orient development to “missing middle” housing on large redevelopment lands – i.e., townhomes and other medium-density housing. This would lower the intensification target by 10 per cent while increasing urban expansion by 860 hectares.
Continued expansion of housing on the city’s outskirts tends to increase dependence on cars and puts pressure on the city’s transportation network if growth is not planned comprehensively — which, as Johnson argues, is what secondary plans accomplish.
However, even with the middle-ground approach of infilling with ‘missing middle’ type units, Johnson said it still means more suburban sprawl.
“The city needs to give permission for expansion because that’s where the market is, and if you want new housing to come online, then it has to be coming online through expansion because the snake eats its own tail,” Johnson said. “This is a financial nightmare for the City of Ottawa.”
