Ottawa is a unique place. We are a city of a million people and growing. We are the capital of a G7 country and, as the second largest city in Ontario, we are an economic centre for growth. Our tourism sector is worth over $2 billion a year, attracting visitors to our national museums, heritage sites and parks, many of which are managed by the National Capital Commission (NCC) or the federal government.
Ottawa, as a city, is in the throes of an economic boom thanks to the many investments being made by the federal government. On-going and pending restoration of the Centre Block and the Supreme Court will provide jobs and economic growth for years. This will build on the success of the recently completed East Block and former Ottawa Union Station.
While a much-lauded downtown reinvestment strategy has been launched, implementation is far too slow. Badly worded and unfair RFPs (requests for proposals) for office to housing conversions, coupled with municipal underinvestment in streets, transit and housing combine to inhibit change.
Vision for excellence
While there may be vision for how our downtown needs to evolve, there is a lack of vision for excellence in how we want our city to grow and be considered among fellow G7 capitals like London, Paris, Tokyo or Washington.
Our investment in Light Rail Transit has had, at best, mixed results. Reliability and affordability continue to be challenges and public trust has been eroded with funding and service cuts despite enhanced budgets for roads and other projects. We’ve opted to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Lansdowne 2.0. Initial audit reports suggest increased cost (and debt), significantly adding to municipal property taxes. Despite the growing popularity of PWHL, a new Lansdowne arena will be smaller than the existing space. More than two years ago we approved a revitalization of the famed ByWard Market but committed nearly no funding and years later, the plan, which largely ignored public input, remains a non-priority.
Decades of austerity budgeting and low value investment continue to haunt us.
According to the Ottawa Construction Association, year to date housing starts are down 28% from this time last year while single detached permits have risen 7% in the same time frame. According to recent data, only 7% of recent building permit applications (43 projects worth $75m) are for apartments. More than half of all permit applications remain for single detached homes (315 applications worth $57m).
Incentivize denser housing
This needs to change. We need to incentivize more moderately dense housing and focus on development that fulfills our ambitious Official Plan goals. That requires bold leadership with a vision for excellence.
Fewer housing starts may be a result of the last 18 months of changes in provincial planning policy, combined with higher interest rates and a sluggish economy. However, our municipal approach to funding infrastructure can play a big part in this: punitive and inequitable development charges disincentivize urban investment to subsidize suburban development.
Decades of underfunding in transit have undermined reliability and affordability, creating a vicious cycle of reduced ridership. The result is that more people drive, further congesting roads and highways which benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars in provincial highway funding, not to mention commitment to spend nearly a billion dollars in municipal road expansion in the coming years.
We need a rethink of our approach.
We need to re-examine how development charges (DCs) are assessed. More than 50% of development charge costs are assigned to roads, sewers and transit infrastructure which already exist in an urban developed site. What effect would a 50% reduction on DCs have in urban development given that an urban project generally imposes no new roads, sewers or transit expansion?
We need to look at how we plan social infrastructure like parks, schools, libraries and community centres. We have billions of dollars’ worth in buildings and parks within the most densely populated areas. Most of these places have seen little or no substantive investment in a generation and are in poor condition. Reinvesting to meet current community needs, not to mention upgrades to become resilient and accessible, will help restore beauty and pride in our communities and will attract people to live and work in the area.
Ottawa can learn from cities like Montreal by enacting a city-wide, year-round, bike share program that is part of our transit network; even in winter, the Bixi bike program expects 4,000 daily users. If successful car-free transformations can work in Montreal, Vancouver or Paris, they can work here if we create the right framework for success. We need to end the “paralysis by analysis” mindset.
#OurBestOttawa
Ottawa can launch a design competition for the ByWard Market. An ideas competition can attract creative solutions that consider the Market as a whole, including broad issues of social justice, equity and heritage. A juried short list of creative solutions can be publicly presented similar to the Sudbury 2050 Competition. A parallel professional competition can request expressions of interest from architectural teams, shortlisting firms to develop ideas addressing the historic market area, tackling the challenges of the unhoused and healthcare needs, and broadly create a plan for renewal. Key to this is municipal commitment to excellence and funding, tied to a vision for the city we aspire to be.
Similarly, Ottawa can launch design competitions for housing, as Edmonton recently did, attracting international attention to develop some of the hundreds of public properties available. Resulting projects can build housing at varying densities that combine economic viability, social benefit and high-quality design.
To make #OurBestOttawa we need to harness the talent, resources and ideas in our city to create positive, socially transformative and beautiful infrastructure. This applies to not just conventional ideas of infrastructure, like roads and transit, but to social infrastructure, like parks and community space, and to policy development in how we plan, commission and fund our city.
The time is now.
This article first appeared in the September 2024 special “City Building” issue of the Ottawa Business Journal. That publication is available in its digital edition below:
