Some local politicians seem to need to be reminded that the Official Ottawa Plan relies heavily on escalation.
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It’s one thing for neighborhood groups to raise predictable concerns about development; it’s not your job to make sure the city’s escalation plan works. It’s quite another for the councillors, the people who last year approved a new Official Plan It relies heavily on stepping up to do it.
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Councilmembers are jeopardizing plans for a 300-unit apartment building downtown based on the flimsiest of reasoning. The proposal for the apartment building is perfectly adapted to the Official Plan of the city. It will take the place of an existing surface parking garage at the corner of Nepean and O’Connor streets. That parking lot now serves an office building across the street at 190 O’Connor. The developers are proposing to replace the office building’s existing parking lot with a surface lot adjacent to the building, but that’s where the trouble begins.
Councilors on the planning committee are in favor of adding 300 apartment units, but some of them find it hard to accept the idea that there are trade-offs in the real world. Construction of the new parking lot would require tearing down an existing six-unit apartment building. Trading one parking lot for another with a net increase of 294 units sounds like a good deal.
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You may not realize it, but those six units, of which only four are occupied, are vitally important to the city. Count Catherine McKenney, a candidate for mayor, represents the district and opposes removing any housing at any time. The councilwoman cited the housing/homeless crisis, climate change and the global pandemic as underlying reasons for her insistence on keeping all six complexes.
“To demolish that building and have the city say ‘go ahead’ and park downtown, 2,000 feet from rapid transit, is really inconceivable,” McKenney told CTV News.
It’s important to note that the developers, Taggart and Glenview, offered the four tenants units with the same number of bedrooms in a nearby building and agreed to lock in their current below-market rent for five years. Despite that, McKenney was offering a line about the need for parking in the future because people would have to live in their cars. Don’t dramatize too much.
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McKenney isn’t on the planning committee, thankfully, but some of the councilmembers responded in ways developers hope. Although the city’s professional planning staff supports the demolition proposal and the 300-unit building, that doesn’t mean much to the council members. Some of them see a planning committee meeting as an opportunity to haggle and haggle.
The planning committee recommended the new apartment building, but members still hope some kind of compromise can be found that will preserve the vital six-unit building. The developers have made it quite clear that the new surface car park is essential to the project, and if they don’t get it, the building won’t happen. Glenview’s Mark Shabinsky told council members his company is dealing with a “commercial reality.” The company has leases with the current tenants of its office building that guarantee parking, and the building would not be competitive in the future without it.
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Count Jeff Leiper, a reasonable fellow who was perhaps not having his best day, was not swayed by that line of argument. He wants “a real effort on the part of the developer to make this work, not only in their interest, but also in the public interest.”
One might have thought that building 300 new apartments downtown was in the public interest, given the housing shortage in the city.
Leiper said: “Everyone involved here wants their cake and to eat it too.” Actually, it’s the councilmen who have a problem with the cake. If a developer makes a proposal that fits all the rules set by the councilmen, why would they have to make additional compromises?
If the city wants to get closer to its escalation goals, councilmembers will need to realize that 300 housing units is better than six. How difficult can that be?
Randall Denley is a political commentator and author from Ottawa. Contact him at [email protected].
