The city of Ottawa is expecting to grow by 400 000 people living in 195 000 new homes in the next quarter century. Where should they go? That’s the question facing urban planners and city council as they prepare a new Official Plan.
City staff have proposed what they call a “balanced” approach: half of the new housing should go in existing residential areas, increasing the population density of those areas, and the other half go in new areas, adding to our urban sprawl. The other options are to not expand the city’s boundary at all, or to accommodate all of the new people in sprawl and leave the existing areas untouched.
Even living in the downtown core, we have a lot of room in the neighborhood to build more densely. More people living on our street and in our area? I’m in. Sign me up.
Expanding our urban boundary would be a monumental mistake. It will be costly and wasteful in money, time, resources, and our environment.
We need to stop our greenhouse gas emissions. This is a basic fact. We’re in a climate crisis that is the single most important issue of our time. Discussing how much we can expand our boundaries by is totally ignoring this hard reality. Even opening the discussion about expanding our urban boundary is an insult to the people who will have to live with the consequences of climate change.
Ottawa’s goal of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the community by 2050 doesn’t come close to what’s required to prevent climate change. The science is clear that we need to eliminate our emissions within ten years. But, even having a debate on expanding the city shows that the city is not taking climate change seriously.
The city talks about growing our transit system, “smart growth” (building new urban centres in outlying area, or whatever other solutions to change the way that we get around and minimize greenhouse gases, but these are just a fantasy. Do you want proof? We can’t even close off roads during a pandemic for pedestrians and cyclists to get out while safely distancing, or give one another space to wait in line. We couldn’t put in a bike lane on Elgin Street.
Most people are still driving to the grocery store, driving to work. The basic design of most of Ottawa is targeted towards driving.
A city’s priorities are shown not in what it says but what it does, and despite great rhetoric and ideas, what we’ve actually done in the last decade clearly shows that preventing climate change is not a priority.
Our infrastructure is already far-flung and expensive. To increase our urban boundary even further means that we’ll need to add to our costs. Sewers, water supply, libraries, transit, police services, fire services, snow removal, park maintenance, these all add up. This will be very expensive. Instead, we should be making more efficient use of the services and infrastructure that we already have.
We can’t even maintain the infrastructure that we have now. Look at the number of potholes we have.
We work hard for our money. We all do. We can’t afford to be adding to our tax bills by building out just to satisfy housing developers’ bottom lines.
Instead, this plan will increase our taxes.
We should be staying within the current boundary. We need to build a smarter, better city, one that respects the environment and our pocketbooks. This isn’t magic. Lots of cities around the world have shown how it can be done.
Vienna, a city that tops the rankings for great places to live, has a population density of 4000 people per square kilometer. Ottawa only has 1900. People who say that a city with more populating density is bad are flat out lying. Other examples from “most liveable cities” lists include Melbourne, Toronto, and Vancouver (with between two – two and a half times the density as Ottawa), San Francisco (almost 4 times the density), Osaka (six times), and Paris (more than ten times the density). These places are among the top places to live in the whole world, and a large part of that comes from their urban intensity. Yet, we want to be less like them.
City staff argued that developers will have a hard time adapting to new methods of building required to construct more intense housing. Give me a break. They have had a long time to figure it out, and if they can’t, then they need to get out of the way and let the people who can get on with the job. The free market is great at dealing with companies that refuse to adapt. It definitely shouldn’t be up to you and me to subsidize them out of our pocket books.
Expanding our urban boundary will increase our greenhouse gas emissions, increase our taxes, and lead to a less liveable city with longer commutes.
Hard decisions lead to an easy life. Easy decisions lead to a hard life. Expanding our urban boundary, going on with business as usual, is taking the easy way out.
But we’re a better city than that and we can do better. We owe it to ourselves
On May 11 there was a meeting with city councilors to discuss the proposed change and more than 100 people signed up to speak, myself included. Because there were so many speakers, all providing lots of facts and reason, I thought that I would mix it up and get a bit creative with my presentation. You can see my speech below. It starts at 4:50:30.
Here is the text of what I had said:
I grew up in Stittsville in the 80s and 90s, and now I have a family in Sandy Hill. I am against expanding the urban boundary and believe that we should choose the no expansion option.
By now you’ve heard that sprawl is costly for services like transit and ruinous to the environment, so instead of repeating those points, I’d like to imagine a future where we’ve kept the urban boundary fixed.
I walk around my neighbourhood, where there are a few more highrises, but mostly there are more two to four story multi-family homes. My own parents, who can no longer drive, have moved out of Stittsville and are now living in a coach house in our back yard. Along Rideau St. and Laurier avenue there are more cafes, restaurants, and shops, because there are more people. There is more transit, so people get around more cheaply and efficiently. My parents enjoyed their big home on a big lot in Stittsville, but not being able to drive anymore, they were stuck at home, and their smaller coach house is so much easier for them to clean. Large numbers of seniors have been downsizing freeing up houses perfect for new homeowners and immigrants.
The better transit means that my daughter, who just finished university, can get to work without a car and she is putting the money that she now saves towards paying off her student debt.
The library, is able to offer a bigger variety of programs, because there are more people in the neighbourhood to support the branch. My neighbours’ kids have borrowed a microscope and brought it to Sandy Hill park. They’re looking excitedly at leaves at the cellular level, ignoring (for once), the much bigger play structure that was installed.
With more eyes on the street and more police officers on patrol, crime rates have gone down. Bikes are still being stolen from people’s garages, but less than they used to be.
The fears of increased housing prices turned out to be overblown, because despite complaints from the large home builder special interest groups, innovative, market-driven solutions have come about, with more apartment buildings around transit, better use of land not just downtown but in areas like Kanata Centrum or Orleans. New, innovative construction companies have done very well and have been growing, creating many jobs.
Finally, with more people living so close to downtown, it just made sense to build bike lanes to the Byward Market and along Elgin St. which makes it easier and safer for families to ride to brunch. Half of the people on our block have gotten rid of their cars, so we have made good progress as a city to our goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
On the other hand, imagine a future where we’ve continued to sprawl. My daughter is looking to buy her first home. Her best option is to buy a nice new home out past Stittsville, but over an hour’s drive from her brother’s house which is past Orleans. Living closer together would mean that my grandchildren could play together more often, but single homes far away was what was on offer, so it was a rational choice to them.
In order to build and support sewers, libraries, snow clearing, transit and so on, to an even farther area, our taxes have had to go up and services have had to be cut. Our local bus route, the 16, got the axe. Taking transit out to see my kids’ families took over an hour anyways, so even though we live a 10 minute walk from the LRT, we’ve had to buy a car.
My parents, moved into a seniors home in Stittsville. They are much less happy there, but with higher taxes, and less services, poorer transit, and more congestion on the road, that was their best option.
Emissions have gone up every year since 2020. Going on with business as usual, we couldn’t say no to sprawl, and it was no surprise when we couldn’t make tough choices about climate change. My kids are furious because they are having to deal with massive flooding of the Ottawa River every single year and other predictable outcomes from climate change.
Hard decisions lead to an easy life. Easy decisions lead to a hard life. Expanding our urban boundary, was the easy way out, but it’s led to a harder life for my kids, me, and my parents.
In conclusion, we work hard for our money. We all do. We can’t afford to be adding to our tax bills by building out just to satisfy housing developers’ bottom lines. A city’s priorities are shown not in what it says but what it does. If addressing our climate emergency and housing and homelessness emergency really is a priority, then we need to follow up with actually doing something about it. Keeping our urban boundary fixed is the action required.
Unfortunately, the vote at planning committee was for expanding the urban boundary, and the matter will land at city council’s desk tomorrow for a vote where it will quite likely pass.