General Ottawa Planning Issues

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With some 'very significant concerns,' city staff racing to respond to provincial housing bill ahead of its passage
City staff will be working "probably all weekend" to analyze the potential impacts of Bill 23's various components on the city and to prepare a response to send to the province

Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Oct 28, 2022 • 58 minutes ago • 4 minute read

City staff are working feverishly to assess and respond to an “absolutely enormous” provincial housing bill about which they have “some very significant concerns” as the provincial government appears to be hurrying towards its passage in the legislature, Ottawa’s planning committee was told Thursday.

Bill 23, or the “More Homes Built Faster” Act, was introduced Tuesday. It proposes far-reaching changes, including legalizing triplexes on most residential lots across the province, reducing — or eliminating, in some cases — the fees municipalities can collect from developers in order to build growth-supporting infrastructure, and doing away with the site plan control process, which deals with aspects including landscaping and drainage for developments under 10 units.

The act’s reach would include laws governing local planning, heritage and conservation practices, and its unveiling was accompanied by a bundle of proposed regulatory changes, on which the province is now consulting.

“The challenge that we have here is that Bill 23 is an absolutely enormous piece of legislation that touches nearly every aspect of functioning of our organization and we have very little time with which to respond,” David Wise, city director of economic development and long-range planning, told members of council’s planning committee on Thursday.

He had been asked how the city and its council members could have input on the legislation, and what kind of information they could expect to receive to share with local residents.

Ideally, staff would write a letter to the province that they would first have formally approved by council, Wise said. But staff don’t expect to have time for that.

Following the bill’s first reading in the legislature on Tuesday, it was scheduled for morning and afternoon debate Wednesday and Thursday and “it looks like the government is aiming for quick passage,” said Timothy Marc, senior lawyer with the city’s planning department.

He said it may not even be possible to give planning committee members 24 hours to review and provide feedback on staff’s response to the bill, depending on when the legislation is sent to the provincial committee stage.

Staff will be working “all night and probably all weekend” to analyze the potential impacts of the bill’s various components on the city and to prepare a response to send to the province, Wise said Thursday.

Information will also be prepared for the mayor and councillors — with the new members of the council table to be sworn-in Nov. 15 — about the municipal implications of the bill, from finances to planning processes.

“I’m sure the newly elected councillors are reading the 78 pages of Bill 23 as we speak. What else could they be focusing on right now?” quipped planning committee co-chair Scott Moffatt.

But the first priority for staff is preparing their submission to the province.

“There are some very significant concerns that staff do have with this piece of legislation and how pervasive and wide-reaching it is, and so we are cognizant that we do need to make sure we provide our perspective back to the province as fast as we can,” said Wise.

Re-elected River ward Coun. Riley Brockington, a member of planning committee as well as the board of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, said everyone he’s worked with wants to facilitate the building of more housing.

“But we have to do it smart and we have to do it right. And sometimes when you go fast, you miss those two points.”

Two recent and significant housing-related bills introduced by the provincial Progressive Conservative government, including one bestowing strong mayor powers on Ottawa and Toronto, were both passed into law in under a month.

Asked about the timing of Bill 23 — introduced the day after municipal elections across the province and before new councils are sworn in, in mid-November — as well as concerns about inadequate time for people to consider and respond to it, a spokesperson for housing and municipal affairs minister Steve Clark provided a statement noting that “urgent and bold action is needed to address Ontario’s housing supply crisis” and that Bill 23 is part of the plan to deliver 1.5 million homes over the coming decade.

“Ontarians sent our government a strong message when they re-elected us earlier this year: that they expect us to deliver on our pledge to get more housing built. With new councils and mayors set to take office next month, there’s no better time for us to work together to deliver on this shared priority.”

Brockington wants to see fulsome committee hearings on Bill 23, where he hopes the provincial government would be open to listening to people from across the province and making changes to its legislation. He also argues that municipalities, already financially stretched, can’t take on more costs that have traditionally been borne by developers to help pay for supporting infrastructure.

“There’s benefit in taking a breath and saying, you know what? We are going to listen to the people of Ontario,” said Brockington.

“Consultation, usually in my experience, yields some good suggestions and can actually make what you’re proposing better. So it’s not going to change the outcome if you just take the right amount of time to do that.”

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...of-its-passage

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Worries for wetlands as Ontario aims to build homes quickly
Conservation authorities expect smaller role in development reviews under new bill

Kate Porter · CBC News
Posted: Oct 28, 2022 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 13 minutes ago

Environmental advocates are raising the alarm that Ontario's latest housing legislation could prevent conservation authorities from helping municipalities review construction projects and see some wetlands re-mapped for development.

The Ford government has also asked the province's three dozen conservation authorities to look at the swaths of land they own to see what could be turned over for housing.

The Conservatives tabled their Build Homes Faster Act on Tuesday. It's dubbed the Housing Supply Action Plan 3.0 on government consultation pages because two other housing bills preceded it: one in 2019 and another this past spring after a housing task force report was released.

The government has determined that 1.5 million homes need to be built over the coming decade. To get there, Premier Doug Ford's government proposed a suite of regulatory changes this week to streamline construction, such as allowing three units on any residential lot.

But it's the change in approach to large ecological systems that span municipal boundaries, and the pared down role for conservation authorities, that have drawn criticism from organizations such as Environmental Defence.

"It's going to potentially unleash one of the biggest reductions in biodiversity and losses of habitat that we've just seen in decades," Phil Pothen, a land use planning and environmental lawyer, and the group's Ontario program manager, told CBC Radio's All In A Day.

"Conservation authorities are still going to play the role they were born to play, which is to protect people and property from flooding and natural hazards and areas where potentially erosion could take place," Ontario's municipal affairs and housing minister Steve Clark told reporters this week.

But Pothen said they do a much bigger job than that, and people rely on them to make sure urban sprawl doesn't destroy how ecosystems function.

Angela Coleman, the general manager of Conservation Ontario, which advocates for all 36 conservation authorities, is indeed concerned the new bill could mean interconnected watersheds, wetlands and natural areas are dealt with in a fragmented way.

Conservation authorities interpret the bill to mean they will have to stick to their core mandate and will no longer be allowed to sign agreements with municipalities to help review development applications — a decades-long practice they say lets municipalities tap into pooled technical expertise that might be costly to do in-house.

Coleman said there could be "unintended consequences" if the work done by 36 conservation authorities shifts to 444 municipalities of different sizes and staffing levels.

Plus, flooding doesn't stop at city limits, Coleman noted.

"Municipal boundaries aren't necessarily the most effective way to plan for, for example, how upstream development would impact the downstream community," she said.

Around Ottawa, the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority helps review planning applications for the City of Ottawa, County of Lanark and United Counties of Leeds and Grenville. The South Nation Conservation Authority also has agreements with communities big and small in eastern Ontario.

As part of its bill, the Ontario government also intends to strip and change language from the manual used to evaluate a wetland's significance.

Various sections about documenting rare species are struck through, while the document has new sections about re-mapping existing wetland "units" instead of looking at an interdependent wetland "complex."

"The worst kind of sprawl developers are going to score on it," said Pothen of Environmental Defence. "It's going to drive up land prices, but it's not going to create more housing because we've already got the land we need."

Pothen pointed out communities already have lots of land identified as "greenfield" for future housing.

Coincidentally, the City of Ottawa's planning committee saw a report Thursday that tabulated it had 1,587 hectares of land — most of it already serviced with water and sewer pipes, that could see 69,078 homes.

Cities must maintain a 15-year supply of land for housing, but the government also wants conservation authorities to look at their holdings. As the housing minister put it, conservation authorities are the "second largest landholder in Ontario next to the Crown."

The Rideau Valley Conservation Authority owns 2,210 hectares, while South Nation holds about 4,450.

South Nation owns the boardwalk path through the Leitrim wetland near the Findlay Creek community, but also forests and lands that are at risk of flooding or a landslide, including near Casselman, Ont.

Its chief administrative officer, Carl Bickerdike, said those lands are used for recreation but also have less obvious benefits for air quality, biodiversity and clean drinking water.

"They're not suitable for development and we will be working hard to maintain them for the public good," Bickerdike added.

Coleman said such lands should be considered for housing as a "last resort." Past generations across the province decided to forgo the profit of development and donated their land, trusting conservation authorities to protect it, she said.

The bill has already moved to second reading for debate at Queen's Park, and conservation authorities don't expect the government to hold round-table discussions to finesse the bill the way it did in 2019.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottaw...ands-1.6631634

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4 ways the PC government's new housing bill could override city powers
Bill 23 could shortchange cities on fees needed for infrastructure and parks

Joanne Chianello · CBC
Posted: Oct 29, 2022 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

There hasn't been an election in the past year where housing affordability hasn't been a hot issue, including Ontario's municipal ones that took place last Monday.

No one promised anything too drastic during the campaigns, but the moment the city elections were over, the provincial government blindsided municipal staff and newly elected councillors with sweeping new legislation that is expected to be passed in short order.

Cities are scrambling to figure out what Bill 23, known as the "More Homes Built Faster Act", means for them.

They are sure of one thing: the Progressive Conservative government's new legislation overrides some of the powers municipalities had to oversee the planning of their own cities.

That's necessary, said Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark on Tuesday, because local pressures are making it virtually impossible to increase the housing supply fast enough.

"We're at the point of BANANA, where it's 'Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone,'" said Clark earlier this week.

Really? Only a few days ago, Ottawa council's planning committee approved more than 4,500 units in a single meeting, including 950 near wetlands. That's on top of the 41,000 units that the committee has approved in the past, but developers haven't built, to say nothing of the 69,000 homes that could be constructed on land that's already serviced and ready to go.

The province is setting a new-homes target for Ottawa of 151,000 by 2031. How they will make developers actually build that many homes — a decision usually based on market forces like interest rates and labour supply — has not been addressed.

But the Ford government appears ready to steamroll over a number of municipal rules to make it easier to build.

Here are four ways the province is hamstringing local authorities when it comes to approving new housing.

1. Affordable housing to the detriment of city amenities

The new legislation provides incentives for developers to build affordable housing — a laudable goal — but one of the ways it's doing that could rob cities of needed millions to build everything from roads and pipes, to libraries and recreation centres.

Development charges (DCs) are fees the city applies to most new construction in the city. That money is put into a big city-wide pot, and it's all earmarked by law for different types of infrastructure. (On Tuesday, Clark suggested that Ontario municipalities were sitting on $8 billion in DC reserves, as if they are some sort of city slush fund instead of money legislated for specific purposes.)

The province is going to waive these fees for affordable and attainable housing. ("Affordable" is being defined as 80 per cent of average market rents or purchase price, while "attainable" is housing that costs no more than 30 per cent of a person's gross income. How all this will work in the real world is not yet clear.)

These exempted fees will amount to millions of dollars, which are used to pay for the infrastructure to support growth. Where will that lost revenue come from? The city has few ways to raise money — fees and taxes. Not recouping this money could have a significant effect on amenities in this city.

Now, the province could have chosen to use one of its powers, such as tax breaks, to incentivize developers to build more affordable units. Instead, the Ford government is suggesting money from the federal government's $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund should be used to refund cities for lost DCs.

The feds are so far silent on the province's idea of how to use their housing money.

2. Less money for parks

The province also seems to believe that a way to make homes more affordable is to put less aside for parkland.

In the suburbs, the city requires that developers set aside one hectare of land for every 300 units built. The new legislation is calling for one hectare per 600 units. In other words, the province will halve the land being required for parks.

In the core, where there isn't much land to set aside physically for parks, developers pay money — known as cash-in-lieu of parkland — which the city saves up until it has enough to buy or develop land into community greenspace.

Bill 23 appears to be undermining this in several ways. It will limit the amount a city can charge for parkland, and will force a municipality to spend 60 per cent of its parkland reserves every year. That will make it incredibly difficult to buy parkland in the inner city, where land is expensive.

And finally, the province will waive all parkland requirements for affordable and attainable housing — but has no plan for how cities are to make up the shortfall.

3. Overriding the R1 zoning

The province appears to be putting an end to exclusionary R1 zoning — the rules that allow only a detached single-family home to be built on a residential property. When the bill is approved, residential buildings with up to three units will become an automatic right for a property owner.

The thinking is that local councils wouldn't have the political will to get rid of R1 zoning. Indeed, many candidates in our most recent election defended the exclusionary designation. But why should a giant single-family home built out to the lot line be allowed, but not a similar-sized building containing three apartments?

The change isn't just for single detached home. Semi-detached and town houses can also each contain three apartments. Now, the city does have infill rules that speak to setbacks and landscaping — to avoid paving over the front yard, for example — but they only apply to units inside the Greenbelt. The new provincial rules will apply to homes across the entire city.

4. Cities to have no say on design

The new legislation could seriously curtail the city's powers to control what the outside of buildings look. A planning process called site plan control is usually the last step in a project before applying for a building permit. Site plan incorporates everything about the outside of a building — from landscaping to parking to building design.

For any building with fewer than 10 units, the province is removing site plan control completely (see concerns around triplexes above). And for larger buildings, Bill 23 declares that "exterior design is no longer a matter that is subject to site plan control."

That means city officials won't be able to regulate issues like architecture, scale, appearance or sustainable design features or environmental design rules (like requiring green roofs on larger buildings).

Removing city involvement in all or parts of site plan control may make development approvals faster, but what long-term effects will it have on the livability and sustainability of the city?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottaw...wers-1.6633897

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Ontario's new housing plan won't solve the problem
Immigration is driving up demand in a province woefully short of housing and the tradespeople to build more

Randall Denley, Ottawa Citizen
Oct 27, 2022 • 2 days ago • 4 minute read

Solving a serious problem like Ontario’s housing shortage has to begin with an honest assessment of the principal cause of the problem, however politically unpalatable that may be. Instead, Ontarians have been repeatedly told that the severe shortage of housing stems from some combination of lack of available land, opposition to redeveloping established neighbourhoods, slow municipal approvals, high development fees and foreign buyers snapping up housing.

These targets are all attacked in the latest version of Ontario’s home building plan, released Tuesday by Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark. Clark is pulling a lot of levers in the plan. Some of them are for show, others will help a little bit. None of them go after the main cause.

At its heart, the housing shortage is a simple issue: people are arriving in the province faster than the housing industry can accommodate them.

Ontario receives more than 200,000 immigrants a year. The province’s housing industry had its best year ever in 2021, building 100,000 homes.

That might work, if Ontario already had an adequate housing supply. It doesn’t. A recent Scotiabank economic report said Ontario needs an additional 650,000 dwelling units to bring the province up to the national average. The chronic housing shortage has built up because the province’s population growth has exceeded its house building capacity for several years. Not coincidentally, the gap started expanding in 2015, when the federal government began a rapid increase in immigration numbers.

Bringing demand and supply back into balance requires both an increase in housing sector construction capacity and a slowing of population growth. Neither of those is fully within the control of the provincial government.

Ontario is doing what it can to expand worker supply by boosting trades training, but it would require a 50 per cent increase in industry capacity to reach the provincial target of 1.5 million homes in 10 years. That’s wildly optimistic. The labour shortage will limit the effectiveness of the plan Clark announced this week. The holdups and delays he is trying to eliminate really only matter when they become so severe that they force the industry to operate below capacity. That’s not the case.

Immigration-driven housing demand, on the other hand, is completely within the control of the federal government. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, immigration targets have increased by about 200,000 people a year to an expected 431,000 this year. About half of them come to Ontario. The province just can’t handle the demand.

Premier Doug Ford should be delivering that message to Trudeau, but don’t hold your breath. Ford is as eager as any premier for high immigration because Ontario is short of workers. Instead, the provincial government is offering a useful distraction in the form of its latest housing plan.

The headline item is allowing three units on existing single family lots without requiring special approvals. The three units would not be triplexes, but would consist of the original house, a converted apartment within it and a coach house. Toronto already allows that, but it’s not a policy that’s going to produce much housing volume.

Nevertheless, the province has set new housing targets for 29 communities. Chief among them are Toronto and Ottawa. Curiously, Toronto’s 10-year target is only 5,000 homes more than the city is already projecting while Ottawa’s more than doubles what is provided in its new Official Plan.

The other big-sounding move is a freeze or reduction in development charges, the fees municipalities impose to help support the cost of growth. Details are a little scant, but the Association of Municipalities of Ontario is concerned that reducing fees will shift costs from developers (and the people who buy new homes) to those already paying property taxes. That’s a valid concern.

While the province is prepared to lower fees municipalities charge, it hasn’t been so generous with its own. Clark’s plan contains no offer to reduce provincial sales tax on new homes or cut the provincial land transfer tax, which is expected to rake in nearly $5.7 billion this year.

More promising is the idea of using surplus provincial lands and partnerships with developers to build what Clark calls “attainable” homes. The multi-faced housing plan also includes the usual boilerplate about building close to transit and “streamlining” municipal approvals.

Steve Clark deserves credit for setting an ambitious home building target, putting the pressure on everyone to get moving and being willing to shake up the often staid and irrational world of municipal planning. That’s a good day’s work. Just don’t expect the new long-term plan to solve Ontario’s housing woes any time soon.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/ra...5-9fd6f7257a38

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Let's put roads on a diet and expand transit in Ottawa instead
Don't blame developers for how poorly we build suburban communities currently. They are just following city guidelines.

Toon Dreessen
Published Dec 19, 2022 • 3 minute read

Ottawa has a road problem.

Decades of underinvestment in affordable transit, combined with continued expansion of car-dependent suburban communities and a housing affordability crisis, has resulted in communities being built outside the greenbelt. These are some of the fastest-growing neighbourhoods in the city.

This growth has been supported by city council and staff, part of a “drive until you qualify” push for housing affordability.

Developers take large financial risks to plan communities, following city guidance, in order to provide housing that is affordable for families, combined with new parks, shopping and serviced land for schools and other social infrastructure. We can complain about this, but they are following the rules and they provide vital options for the housing we need.

But these decisions have generational impact. Building communities with insufficient transit and lack of road capacity chokes the ability of people to travel around the broader city.

Consider the widening of the Airport Parkway. The city has committed billions to extend and improve the Trillium Line South rail line to improve transit access. The concept of induced demand suggests that widening a road doesn’t help with congestion. With the planned renewal of the South Keys shopping plaza and residential growth in Ottawa’s southern communities, adding more lanes of traffic will undermine the public transit investment.

The proposed design effectively creates a divided highway with four lanes, which deposits more vehicles on an already-overloaded Bronson Avenue, which has zero room for growth. Does it make sense to add more upstream capacity if the downstream outlet remains fixed?

In the east end, there’s a growing community around the village of Navan. Major developments have provided homes for hundreds of families but there has been insufficient growth of related transit infrastructure. An $8-million park-and-ride at Brian Coburn Boulevard and Navan Road goes largely unused due to insufficient, unreliable transit service. Stage 2 of the LRT brings better transit to the northern edge of Orléans but does little for growth south of Innes Road.

Drivers use Navan Road, a decades-old, narrow, two-lane country road. The intersection at the Blackburn Bypass, a 1980s’ construction meant to address traffic demands in Orléans, is routinely congested for brief peak periods. The lack of a park-and-ride at Blair Station, combined with easy access to Highway 417 from Innes, makes for a difficult argument to take transit instead.

Multiple options have been proposed. A current leading contender, called “Option 7” proposes a new multi-lane, divided, limited-access parkway running along and through the edges of the Mer Bleue Bog. Controlled by the National Capital Commission, this land is critical to the environmental health of the bog. The NCC has indicated it will not support this option.

It may make more sense to improve Navan Road, construct dedicated bus lanes from the Brian Coburn park-and-ride to the Blair LRT station, and make sure that transit is frequent and reliable. Induced demand suggests that if drivers see buses zooming past them while they sit in traffic, more of them may be encouraged to leave their cars behind.

In both examples, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in design and construction costs. Both projects come with millions in additional annual costs for snow-clearing and other maintenance. Both seek to solve a perceived congestion problem that lasts for brief periods at peak commute times. If we implement both, and want to maintain a moderate taxation rate, it will be at the social cost of housing, cultural and community spaces, parks or other sustainability investments.

It is not too late to do the following:

• We need to make our communities complete by implementing walkable, accessible, bikeable networks within communities to access services and daily needs within a 15-minute community;
• We need to improve transit within communities;
• We need to improve transit connections from communities to the LRT.

If we don’t, we are choosing to bury ourselves in costs to incrementally improve the lives of the few by reducing commuting times by minutes or seconds. We deprive our city of a sustainable future and perpetuate outmoded planning of growth.

Toon Dreessen is President of Architects DCA.

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/dr...ottawa-instead

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Q&A: Jeff Leiper, the new chair of city council's reworked planning and housing committee
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper is now chairing the Ottawa city council committee responsible for planning and development oversight.

Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Published Jan 18, 2023 • Last updated 4 hours ago • 6 minute read

A longtime inhabitant of the world of city planning and development, Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper is now chairing the council committee responsible for its oversight.

A community association activist turned councillor for a ward that’s been a magnet for intensification in Ottawa, Leiper sat on planning committee throughout each of his first two terms.

He’s well-acquainted with the jargon and law particular to this policy realm, and already knows many of the major players, from developers to community groups, who populate it. He’s also deeply familiar with files the committee will be seized with this term, including a major overhaul to the city’s zoning bylaw, dictating what can get built where.

While he’s bringing this background with him to the head of the committee table, which has an expanded housing-focused mandate and a new name to go with it, Leiper took pains to dismiss any notion that he’s trying to be “minister of planning and housing,” influencing the work of the committee and department that reports to it in an outsized way.

Rather, he explained in an interview this week, he wants to help his fellow members — a mix of new and veteran councillors, suburban and rural — get the information they need to engage independently with the work of the committee on policy and development applications, and thoughtfully exercise their individual votes. Those start today, when the committee meets for the first time this term.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

You are the first chair of the newly named planning and housing committee. Can you explain how the work of the committee will change from what it involved previously, or is this just a rebrand?

The committee now has a significantly broader mandate to achieve affordable housing in the city.

I think part of it also branding. We’ve heard the message from the province that it wants cities in Ontario to build more units of housing, and the shift in name, I think, is partly to reflect the clear mandate that we have now from the province to approve housing development.

That’s not to say that we haven’t been achieving our mandate in the run-up to this name change.

Of all committees, planning has traditionally had the heaviest workload. Why did you want this job, and what kind of planning committee chair are you going to be?

I’m the councillor for Kitchissippi, and we have been on the leading edge of all of the intensification trends of the past 20 years.

It’s created discomfort among residents, quite frequently. And I ran for office eight years ago in the hope of being able to make a contribution toward more thoughtful intensification, so that the process was not as wild-west as what we were perceiving in the community.

One of the things we’re starting to see now, and we’ve said this for a long time, is that intensification is going to occur right across the city. The province has now weighed in with Bill 23, with a very clear mandate to have significant new intensification right across Ottawa. I think it is an exciting opportunity to work at a city scale in terms of up-zonings, in terms of intensification; approving developments that are significantly denser, significantly taller right across the city. And to try to do that in a way that is coherent, that is managed, that isn’t ad hoc.

Our zoning in the city hasn’t matched the official plan for probably several decades. That leads to mistrust on the part of residents who look at re-zonings and wonder why they are being approved. It’s because there’s a mismatch between what the official plan says and what the zoning that’s in place actually does. The opportunity of the comprehensive zoning bylaw review (slated for this term) is to bring the zoning up to match what the official plan says, so at least people know.

Is there a rulebook — or marching orders from the mayor’s office — about how you’re supposed to approach this job as chair? If not, how are you defining your own mandate?

There is no mandate from the mayor with respect to how to be a chair. I think there’s a lot of latitude in terms of how the chair approaches the job.

The decisions that come out of city hall shouldn’t be defined by any one given individual, whether that’s planning and housing or whether that’s transportation or whether that’s infrastructure. The decisions that come out of city hall should be the result of expert and independent recommendations from city staff, and thoughtful, well-informed, independent evaluation of those recommendations by the politicians who people have elected to represent them.

I think the chair has a unique function on committees of making sure that members who are being asked to consider and contemplate these recommendations have all the information they need. I think chairs have a particular responsibility to make sure that where council has indicated a focus, that council is providing oversight to staff to make sure that we’re achieving that focus. But it’s not any one individual’s job to try to nudge legislation in one direction or another.

Even if they are a chair?

Even if they are a chair. This isn’t a parliament. We don’t have ministers. The decisions that come out of city hall are made by all of council.

Planning is a committee where members are asked to make decisions that interest groups often care deeply about. Developers, obviously, but also community associations in members’ wards. You’ve mentioned this is almost certainly your last term on council and that you don’t think at this point you will run for a fourth term. Do you think that knowledge will influence your work on planning committee in any way?

I think we want to do right by the residents of Ottawa. So, no.

I’m going to continue to be guided by the people I trust in the community and the folks with whom I’ve worked closely for eight years now on planning files.

The general manager of planning, real estate and economic development, Steve Willis, left city hall over the summer. The mayor has given council the power to decide on his permanent replacement. What qualities would you like to see in the person who ultimately fills that job and why?

A spirit of collaboration with council is going to be critical. There’s going to have to be a political sensitivity to understanding where the room is to move forward on planning issues, between sometimes highly academic considerations at a staff level, at an industry level — like the planning industry and what it thinks is good — and what the residents of Ottawa are willing to accept. Council’s job is going to be to try to find that balance. We’re going to need a collaborator at the city to work with us on that.

This would never happen, but in a worst case scenario, staff bring recommendations forward to council that they ought to know are politically unpalatable. We don’t see that much. I think we’ve had GMs of planning who have worked with city staff to ensure that the recommendations that are moving forward are recommendations to which council is going to be open-minded. But that collaboration to ensure that staff and council are moving forward in a productive way is probably one of the most important qualities that a GM can bring.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...sing-committee

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Why Ottawa should look to Calgary when converting office space to housing

Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Published Feb 28, 2023 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 5 minute read

A resolution recently passed by city council should help re-animate the downtown core by encouraging the conversion of empty office buildings to residential use.

It aims to examine reducing fees and building-permit wait times for developers undertaking such projects, provided they dedicate 20 per cent of the units to affordable housing.

An increase in housing could certainly be achieved by incentivizing developers, but affordable housing is a far less likely outcome, and tying the two together makes little sense.

It’s great on paper. The trend away from at-office work was already in progress when the pandemic struck, and any “return to normal” won’t fill the downtown core. Conversions, whether to residential or a mix of other uses — daycares, artists’ studios or concert venues, for example — are vital to enlivening downtown Ottawa.

“The alternative,” says Somerset Ward Coun. Ariel Troster, who brought forward the resolution, “is more downturn in our downtown, and the gutting of downtown, which is not good for the city.”

But conversions are expensive, in some cases more so than demolishing and rebuilding, and incentives from the city may not be enough to convince developers to include affordable housing. A better solution would be to develop strategies to deal with housing and affordable housing separately. The federal government, once the lead on affordable housing, needs to pick up that mantle again.

Pierre-Jacques Lefaivre is vice-president of Groupe MACH, the Montreal-based developer that last year bought 110 O’Connor St. and is still deciding whether to convert the empty 14-storey building, formerly home to DND — to residential. They’d consider all proposals, he says, but doubts most developers would be willing to make the tradeoff. “If I save six months on the permit process, is six months of mortgage interest and municipal taxes going to cover the loss of building 20 per cent affordable? I don’t know.”

Oz Drewniak, president of Ottawa’s CLV Group Developments, which is converting 473 Albert St. — formerly the Trebla office building — to 158 residential units, cites numerous advantages of office-to-residential conversions, including increased housing density and vibrancy downtown, increased transit ridership, and a reduced carbon footprint by not demolishing and rebuilding.

But converting has enormous challenges, including site remediation, structural upgrades, and changes to stormwater management, ventilation and plumbing. Additionally, most office buildings, because of their large floor plates or advanced age, aren’t suitable for residential conversion. And many that are don’t lend themselves to units with more than two bedrooms, leaving families out in the cold.

Municipal fees, Drewniak says, such as the $1 million he says the city charged him in lieu of creating parkland, along with long waits for building permits, make projects onerous, especially if an affordability quota is added. “The economics of it becomes very difficult.”

But Anthony Leaning, principal architect at CSV Architects, which converted 44 Eccles St., a onetime school-turned-office building, into 46 affordable housing units for Cornerstone Housing for Women, warns against giving away the farm with the hope of getting affordable housing.

“Developers would love if there were no zoning requirements,” he says. “And at the other end of the scale is a process that’s so bureaucratic that it’s detrimental to everyone’s objectives. And where we are is somewhere in between.

“There are parts of the development approval process that I find cumbersome and irritating, but I would say that on balance, we’re getting better and better buildings. The development process is complicated, and there’s always room for streamlining, improving and tweaking it, but I think dramatic changes tend to have unintended consequences.”

Among those would be the burden on the city if development fees are greatly reduced. Who then pays for the amenities required by growth? Taxpayers?

The answer may lie in the model used in Calgary, where downtown office vacancy rates have soared since the oil industry tanked in the mid 2010s, giving the city a six-year head start over other cities in finding a solution.

Facing 12 million square feet of empty office space — more than 30 per cent of its total — Calgary developed a plan to convert half of that space to residential within 10 years.

According to Natalie Marchut, development and strategy manager for Calgary’s Downtown Strategy Team, they estimated it would take about $450 million to accomplish, and the city, hoping for a three-way split with the province and feds (which hasn’t yet happened), has already committed $153 million to the project.

They opted to keep things simple: affordable housing, although a municipal priority, was not mandatory.

“That was very intentional,” she says. “We just wanted to address this widespread office vacancy and housing crisis.”

It turns out they didn’t have to demand affordability. The program, which includes financial incentives — a recent $38 million conversion, for example, got nearly $8 million back from the city — and some flexibility on code requirements where it’s deemed safe, such as underground parking or stairwell dimensions, has created a lot of competition among developers, with many including affordable units or climate initiatives in the hope that their bids will be chosen.

Admittedly, the buildings being converted in Calgary are about a decade younger than those in Ottawa, thus likely requiring fewer upgrades. But the results have been impressive. In 18 months since accepting submissions from developers, eight projects have been approved and work started, with more than 1,000 mostly rental units replacing a million square feet of empty office space. Another six projects, which will create almost as many residential units, are currently in the approval process.

Among the factors developers find so attractive, says, Marchut, is the exemption for development permits for conversion projects, and the certainty of approval.

If Ottawa’s council looks closely at Calgary, perhaps they’ll find a program that might work here. Who knows? Given enough incentive and competition, perhaps developers will come up with affordable solutions, or mixed-use options, that will make Ottawa’s downtown more attractive without being told they have to.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...ace-to-housing

[rocketphish]

Ontario has over a million homes in the pipeline, but needs developers to put shovels in the ground: report
Planning experts say problem is not slow approvals process or availability of land

Shawn Jeffords · CBC News
Posted: Mar 12, 2023 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

Ontario has more than 1.25 million potential new homes already in the development pipeline — it just needs to figure out how to convince builders to get shovels in the ground, say experts who manage planning in cities across Ontario.

The Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario (RPCO) came to that conclusion in a new report released this week on the state of the province's unbuilt housing supply.

The figure reflects the number of homes developers have been approved for permits to build, but have not yet materialized. Once approved by municipalities, there is no set timeline by which a developer must build the homes.

The RPCP says its calculations are based on numbers from late last year, before the Ford government passed the controversial Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act.

The bill aims to help the government build 1.5 million new homes over the next decade — a figure that does not include the homes already approved to be built. But the planners say if the province could incentivize developers to build what is already approved by municipalities, they'd be 85 per cent of the way toward their goal, well ahead of their target.

"I think (the report) starts to tell the story that the housing supply challenge isn't really a land supply or development approval problem," said RPCO chair Thom Hunt. "The bigger problem is, probably, how do you compel a developer to build? How do you increase the rate of construction?"

Premier Doug Ford's government says Ontario is in a housing supply crisis, and has introduced a number of bills to address it, including Bill 23. The legislation contains a number of controversial elements including waiving or freezing development charges which are used to pay for sewers, parks and community centres around new homes.

The province has also proposed what the government has called a "land swap" to remove pieces of the protected Greenbelt to build 50,000 new homes, a move that contradicts an earlier promise not to touch protected area.

But the RPCO report shows the government doesn't need to move ahead with that plan, Hunt said.

"The takeaway from this is that you don't need to do urban boundary expansions for the most part and you certainly don't need to go into the Greenbelt area," he said.

Hunt said the numbers also suggest that the government will need to make special efforts to ensure that affordable housing will be built amongst that supply. Partnerships between the federal and provincial governments, not-for-profits and the private sector will be required to address that urgent need, he said.

"That is probably the better way to engage on the housing crisis than say, looking at it through the land supply lens, which may only realize market rate housing at the end of the day," he said.

Toronto city councillor Brad Bradford cautions people against looking at the numbers in the report and thinking the province has solve the housing crisis. As it points out, getting those homes built is complex, he said.

"I think that the development pipeline often gets weaponized by folks that don't want to see more housing built," he said. "We are facing historic headwinds in our effort to deliver more housing and deliver more supply across Toronto."

Those include rising interest rates, which makes building more expensive for developers, inflationary pressures on supplies and the on-going labour shortage, he said.

"We can't rest on our laurels of approval," said Bradford, chair of the city's Planning and Housing Committee and a former city planner.

"It's going to require a whole of government and collaborative response with industry."

Toronto's chief planner Gregg Lintern said the city approved an average of over 29,700 residential units a year from 2017 to 2021. During that same period, only around 16,000 units were built annually.

That creates an average yearly surplus of approximately 13,700 units, ensuring a "steady supply of approved housing," he said in a statement.

"While the City typically approves twice as many units as get built, it is important to ... enable a full range of housing supply to meet diverse needs and work to improve the development review process and reduce approval timelines," he said.

Matti Siemiatycki, the director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto, said the RPCO's numbers show that there are sometimes misconceptions around the approvals process. While approvals can take time for some projects, it's clear there are market forces at work that result in approved developments not getting built immediately, or sometimes at all.

"We also know that not every unit that gets approved gets built," he said. "And I think we need much more of an investigation into why that happens."

Siemiatycki said developers are sensitive to market forces and are also wary of community pushback over projects. Sometimes they are also subject to internal shifts in direction within their own companies which can derail approved housing plans, he said.

But municipalities are under enormous pressure to expedite planning work, so when they spend the time vetting a project and it fizzles, that's a problem, he said.

"We ultimately need more places for people to live in more housing units," he said. "And if the system is being blocked up with projects that aren't being built and if there's a way to thin that out … that's really important."

A spokesperson for Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark said the government can't "sit idly by" as the cost of housing continues to rise. Even if all of the homes in the report are built, the province will still need hundreds of thousands more to meet the 1.5 million home target by 2031, Victoria Podbielski said in a statement.

She said Bill 23 is already speeding up approvals and the construction process.

"We will continue to build on this progress with further housing supply action plans that ensure red tape and excessive costs do not stop hypothetical approvals from becoming real homes."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...uilt-1.6774509

[J.OT13]

In certain municipalities, Ottawa amongst them, thousands of units have been approved but won't be built for a while or never built. There's so much cities can do, at some point, it's up to the developers. It's more than just the approval process. There's a labour shortage, the high cost of materials.

The Provinces targets should be about approved homes, maybe based on density than just sheer numbers, and not homes built. Province also needs to take a bigger role in building affordable housing. The crisis is more about the lack of affordable housing than just housing in general.

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

In certain municipalities, Ottawa amongst them, thousands of units have been approved but won't be built for a while or never built. There's so much cities can do, at some point, it's up to the developers. It's more than just the approval process. There's a labour shortage, the high cost of materials.

The Provinces targets should be about approved homes, maybe based on density than just sheer numbers, and not homes built. Province also needs to take a bigger role in building affordable housing. The crisis is more about the lack of affordable housing than just housing in general.

No there is a shortage of all types of housing and the data backs this, so stop denying it. And yes the feds/province need to get back into the game if building social/subsidized housing.

As for the article the only thing correct in it is that certain nimbys like to weaponize the numbers so they can stop/delay needed housing....

Approved is a loose definition and can include things that are still going through the planning process.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Williamoforange

No there is a shortage of all types of housing and the data backs this, so stop denying it. And yes the feds/province need to get back into the game if building social/subsidized housing.

As for the article the only thing correct in it is that certain nimbys like to weaponize the numbers so they can stop/delay needed housing....

Approved is a loose definition and can include things that are still going through the planning process.

I had a feeling you'd respond as such. I did say "crisis is more about the lack of affordable housing". I don't think anyone can deny that we are lacking more affordable housing than housing in general. Yes, there's a general housing crisis, but we have a bigger issue when it comes to affordable housing.

The development in Orleans that was put on hold because of a slightly lower number of parking spots than desired was ridiculous. As affordable housing replacing a parking lot and empty grass field, it should have been approved outright.

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

I had a feeling you'd respond as such. I did say "crisis is more about the lack of affordable housing". I don't think anyone can deny that we are lacking more affordable housing than housing in general. Yes, there's a general housing crisis, but we have a bigger issue when it comes to affordable housing.

The development in Orleans that was put on hold because of a slightly lower number of parking spots than desired was ridiculous. As affordable housing replacing a parking lot and empty grass field, it should have been approved outright.

It would help if you stop trying to confuse affordable housing with subsidized/social housing....

Because again it's about the lack of all housing and getting more housing built will result in it being more affordable to the general population. (Supply and demand is a real thing as much as you don't like to acknowledge)

Yes it was ridiculous and so have been many of the other denials or attempted ones in other areas of the city, but hey you know 6 stories is apparently to much for Urban Ottawa....

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Williamoforange

It would help if you stop trying to confuse affordable housing with subsidized/social housing....

Because again it's about the lack of all housing and getting more housing built will result in it being more affordable to the general population. (Supply and demand is a real thing as much as you don't like to acknowledge)

Yes it was ridiculous and so have been many of the other denials or attempted ones in other areas of the city, but hey you know 6 stories is apparently to much for Urban Ottawa....

What's your take on the Ford Conservatives voting down the NDP Private-Member's bill requiring generators in apartment buildings so that people don't get trapped in their home without water when the power goes out?

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/pa...or-emergencies

https://obj.ca/rental-property-owner...l-legislature/

[phil235]

Originally Posted by Williamoforange

It would help if you stop trying to confuse affordable housing with subsidized/social housing....

I am curious as to how you would define the difference between these terms.

[rocketphish]

Here are some official definitions of affordable housing:

https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/profe...sing-in-canada

https://www.ontario.ca/page/affordable-housing-ontario

[phil235]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

Here are some official definitions of affordable housing:

https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/profe...sing-in-canada

https://www.ontario.ca/page/affordable-housing-ontario

Thanks for those. On a practical level, virtually all affordable housing in Canada involves some sort of subsidy program, so I'm wondering about the distinction that is being made. It's possible that the reference is just to housing that is affordable based on average salaries in a region, but that is virtually non-existent in bigger metro areas these days.

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

What's your take on the Ford Conservatives voting down the NDP Private-Member's bill requiring generators in apartment buildings so that people don't get trapped in their home without water when the power goes out?

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/pa...or-emergencies

https://obj.ca/rental-property-owner...l-legislature/

That considering who broight it forth it was probably badly written and didn't consider the side effects..

[Williamoforange]

Originally Posted by phil235

Thanks for those. On a practical level, virtually all affordable housing in Canada involves some sort of subsidy program, so I'm wondering about the distinction that is being made. It's possible that the reference is just to housing that is affordable based on average salaries in a region, but that is virtually non-existent in bigger metro areas these days.

Except that's not really true and until somewhere in the last decade (20 years after government got out of the social housing construction) housing at market rate was affordable to the masses.

And yes that's what affordable housing is, housing that is affordable to the masses, unfortunately most cities no longer build enough homes to keep up with demand for a variety of reasons and the government doesn't build subsidized housing anymore, so here we are in a housing crisis.

Where we get people arguing that 25 stories next to mass transit is bad, or that rental parking should be a 1:1 ratio, main streets shouldn't be higher then 4 stories, or that 9 stories in the Urban core is too tall because it's near SFH (like say 500 lisgar)....

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by phil235

Thanks for those. On a practical level, virtually all affordable housing in Canada involves some sort of subsidy program, so I'm wondering about the distinction that is being made. It's possible that the reference is just to housing that is affordable based on average salaries in a region, but that is virtually non-existent in bigger metro areas these days.

This isn't entirely true. Affordable housing can also be abundant when salaries are high and zoning is liberal.

[phil235]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

This isn't entirely true. Affordable housing can also be abundant when salaries are high and zoning is liberal.

You’re right - my comment was an over-generalization. On the zoning point, affordability often coincides with sprawl, meaning that a good part of the savings on housing are eaten up by the need to drive everywhere. But overly restrictive zoning (plus NIMBYism) are definitely drivers of unaffordable housing.