By Justin Campbell
On a bright winter day, the wind howls forcefully across the open spaces of Tunney’s Pasture, the federal government campus envisioned seven decades ago as a way to decentralize the Canadian government some distance from the downtown core of the National Capital.
Roads are narrow and campus buildings stand far apart. Government employees huddle for a smoke against buildings, while others walk long distances to their cars for the commute home.
“It’s a bit of a hike all the way to the Brooke Claxton building,” Tadg O’Hare, an employee at Health Canada, said while shivering in the wind outside the landmark tower at the heart of Tunney’s Pasture. “Usually, it’s quite windy no matter what time of the year.”
The National Capital Commission, which oversees federal properties in Ottawa-Gatineau, has a new vision for Tunney’s Pasture, which is situated between the city’s Mechanicsville, Champlain Park and Hintonburg neighbourhoods. The NCC’s plan represents a dramatic shift in character and purpose from federal government office space to housing.
The 2014 Tunney’s Pasture masterplan had called for a doubling of the number of office workers, from approximately 10,000 to 20,000, over a 25-year period. But in a meeting earlier this year, the NCC’s board of directors recommended that the original plan be revamped to help address Canada’s housing crisis in a post-pandemic world where remote work is much more common and far fewer public servants are occupying office space on a daily basis.
“This amendment places a much greater emphasis on housing,” Alain Miguelez, the NCC’s vice-president of capital planning, stated at the January meeting of the NCC board.
The amendment will slash the number of on-site public servants at Tunney’s Pasture to 7,600 as the government’s property branch, Public Services and Procurement Canada, plans to sell 50 per cent of its total supply of office space over the next 10 years. A dozen of these property parcels are at Tunney’s Pasture.
Last year’s federal budget directed PSPC to divest itself of half of its property holdings to accommodate more housing, including through refurbishment and repurposing of former office buildings. The rise in remote and hybrid work in the post-COVID era is a key driver of the change, even with public servants being required to work in person in their offices three days a week, which the government instituted as a condition of employment last September.
Carleton University professor Linda Duxbury, an expert in management and workplace issues, said she isn’t impressed with the government’s handling of this trend.
“Picking a number of days randomly out of the air and saying this is how many days people can work at home is absolutely 100-per-cent stupid and wrong,” she argued.
Duxbury is also frustrated with the lack of clarity on what remote work means generally, with the government operating on a “ready, fire, aim” approach — making arbitrary decisions, in her view, based on belief rather than research or data, and without taking long-term implications into account. She said she doubts any long-term thinking is being applied to the Tunney’s Pasture redevelopment plan regarding federal office spaces.
“They’re going too fast,” she said. “They can’t do anything irreversible right now with any workspace at Tunney’s Pasture until they know better. If you put it as housing, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.”
The new plan calls for land, buildings and the street network to be transferred to the Canada Lands Corporation, the federal agency that in turn will prepare it all for sale to private developers.
The CLC has also mandated that 20 per cent of the planned housing at Tunney’s Pasture must be affordable. Up to 9,000 housing units are included in the new vision for the campus. That means a minimum of 1,800 affordable housing units may be made available.
Where exactly the affordable housing will be built — and whether the percentage of units would apply to each parcel of land or the overall campus — isn’t clear yet. And residents of nearby neighbourhoods, who are monitoring developments at Tunney’s Pasture with great interest, are looking for more answers.
“That hasn’t been a specific topic of the working group yet, but I think there’s one meeting coming up in the spring for it,” said Kate Curry, network coordinator for the Ottawa Community Benefits Network, a working group of area community associations.
The OCBN wants to see Tunney’s Pasture transformed into a mixed-use community with an emphasis on affordable housing, environmental sustainability, community amenities and transit-oriented development.
“Public land should serve public interest,” said Curry.
While Ottawa and all of Canada faces a housing crisis, a contentious point among advocates for affordable housing is what gets defined as “affordable.”
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation lists the average family income before taxes in Ottawa as $125,700 as of 2021. According to a 2018 housing report by the housing and poverty advocacy group ACORN Canada, affordable housing is defined by rent that costs less than 30 per cent of a low-income household’s gross monthly income.
Apartments.com currently lists the average one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa at $1,764 per month. For a low-income tenant earning $20,000 gross income annually, that would represent 95 per cent of their monthly income.
Tom Ledgley, coordinator with Horizon Ottawa, a progressive municipal advocacy group, sees a similar issue.
“A lot of the time, I’ll see numbers that are a lot lower than 20 per cent (portion of affordable housing per development). But that isn’t enough. The whole development should be affordable housing, because that is truly lacking in the city.”
According to Curry, forces are at work to increase CLC’s mandated percentage for affordable housing at Tunney’s Pasture.
“The Hintonburg Community Association recently suggested that they up the affordable housing targets to 40 per cent,” she said.
Curry and Ledgley are both optimistic that buildings at Tunney’s Pasture, such as Brooke Claxton, the Central Heating Plant, and R.H. Coats can, with some work, be repurposed as housing units and neighbourhood amenities. Another factor to consider it that the heating plant, along with Brooke Claxton, are heritage-designated structures. The NCC’s plan suggests that the heating plant could be repurposed as a community centre.
“Maybe the buildings themselves are in a good enough condition that they can be converted. Maybe not. I think the government sees the potential for the conversion to housing, and that they want to facilitate that happening.”
— Kate Curry, network coordinator, Ottawa Community Benefits Network
“Maybe the buildings themselves are in a good enough condition that they can be converted,” Curry said. “Maybe not. I think the government sees the potential for the conversion to housing, and that they want to facilitate that happening.”
“I would argue to just get going,” Ledgley said, regarding the transfer of federal office space to affordable housing at Tunney’s Pasture. “That’s a great idea. We don’t need this office space anymore.”
The amended plan places emphasis on the Tunney’s Pasture LRT station as a key hub for the redeveloped campus, with high-rise buildings clustered around it to encourage a transit-oriented community. But there is some concern regarding OC Transpo’s eventual ability to handle the traffic.
“I would really hate to see a situation where it gets built and the existing transit doesn’t adequately service the residents,” Ledgley said.
Earlier consultations with community groups showed that overflow parking was the greatest concern among area residents, along with building heights or residential intensification.
“The greater density means greater use of cars if we don’t have an effective transit system,” Curry warned.
From a heritage perspective, the campus is likely to lose its original character as it’s redeveloped and intensified. The Brooke Claxton building, which dates from the early 1960s, is a nationally designated heritage site because of its distinctive modern architecture and historic importance as a symbol of Canada’s public health system.
“Once you move away from that low-rise profile of the original concept, I think it will be lost,” said Linda Hoad of Heritage Ottawa, the city’s leading advocate for preserving architectural history. “That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because times change, and we need the density.”
According to the NCC’s new plan for Tunney’s Pasture, several federal buildings slated for transfer to CLC — including Brooke Claxton — are identified for their heritage value. Brooke Claxton is a focal point of the campus, standing closest to the Ottawa River and acting as the horizon landmark at the end of Holland Avenue. It’s possible it could be repurposed as apartments.
“I wonder how much you could get for the penthouse on the top floor. Think of the views,” Hoad wondered aloud. “This building can be readily adapted for residential use. It seems like quite a good place to have a residential tower.”
Hoad said she hopes to see a well-integrated community that works well with its neighbours while retaining some of the buildings.
“Keeping the street framework, I think, is very important, and keeping some of the buildings and making the best of them — it seems to me that that’s probably the best of both worlds,” she said.
“We want heritage to be considered and integrated as much as possible, but not stand in the face of progress or working towards the future that we need.”
For public servants like O’Hare, it’s all about location.
“I wouldn’t mind living at Tunney’s Pasture if it were redeveloped, as there’s a decent amount of stuff to do in Hintonburg, and it’s not too far from downtown,” he said before hustling towards the entrance of the Brooke Claxton building to escape the biting wind.
