I’m pulling back this thread because there seems to be a lot of discussion about the future of Ottawa’s downtown and it is taking over the 2022 Ottawa Municipal Election thread. I thought that this might be a more appropriate place for all those comments.
Ottawa’s core has developed over the last 190+ years. In general, it began as the place where the military set up its barracks, with ‘preferred’ housing close by. The main retail (market) was located in the ‘lower town’ area until more up-scale retailers started taking space around Barracks Hill. Retail and services provided the bulk of the jobs for the general population.
Because almost all of the work and amenities were located in the city’s core, living on its fringe was the preferred area for many. Living further out meant that commuting to work was a necessity. However, as the city grew, two things happened: The land nearer the core got even more expensive; and better methods of commuting were developed. For example, the electric streetcars enabled people to more easily travel from newly developed ‘sub-urban’ areas into their jobs in the core.
Gradually, people moved their homes further out from the tight core of the city. This gave them cheaper accommodations. Less expensive housing allowed them to either get more house and land (if they were fortunate enough to earn a decent wage), or to at least to keep a roof over their head (if they were not earning much money or were trying to save up). However, the ‘up-town’ / ‘down-town’ area was still the primary area for jobs and retail.
Why have I described something that, probably, everyone on this forum already knows? Because it seems that some are not taking the history of Ottawa’s development into account when they declare what they think should be done – and it should be done immediately.
As the core developed and grew, the city’s population also grew, but was still quite small. Public amenities were not as ‘necessary’ as they are today. (For example, folks could simply walk down to the river to go swimming on a hot day – so there was no real need to use scarce public funds for a public ‘swimming pool’.)
FAST-FORWARD to 1990: There are still a tremendous number of jobs clustered in the city’s core, but many are to support the government. The bulk of the buildings there are office towers, which clear out after the work-day ends – leaving a sparce population downtown in the evenings. Most of the retail and services has followed the movement of people out into the suburbs. Commuting is still, relatively, easy since buses travel directly from the suburbs to the core.
Because the office area of the downtown has grown from a few blocks to cover many blocks, the ‘dead’ area in the evening has also grown. Without activities in the area, there is no real incentive for people to travel to the downtown except for their daily office job. There was no reason at all to spend much public money to develop public facilities in the area. Some of the small parks that supported the few people who lived on the fringe of the original core might have been maintained, or they might have been developed for new office space.
In short (I know, too late for that!); Ottawa’s downtown has developed over many, many years as a place where people go to work for the day but then return to their home in the suburbs. Most retail and services remaining in the downtown have evolved to support that function. It is in the suburbs, near their homes, that people access the needed retail, services, and recreational facilities for everything else.
FAST-FORWARD to 2019: There has been a push to develop residential towers in and near the core of the city. There has also been a movement to ‘decentralize’ the offices, with government departments being moves out of the core, and into some suburbs. The goal of these changes is to make neighbourhoods more ‘complete’, allowing people to stay closer to their homes for all of their needs, including going to work.
Unfortunately, the downtown evolved over many years to be the ‘work hub’, and to change it into being just a densely-populated ‘suburb-like’ area over such a short time is difficult, to say the least. Public amenities that are enjoyed out in the suburbs, like parkland and public pools, have had to be provided by the builders of the residential towers – but those are private features, like in-building pools, exercise rooms, and roof-top terraces. Not that private facilities can’t be even nicer that public ones, but they are a cost that must be borne by only the residents of the specific building, and not the population of the city. This reinforces the cost difference between living in the downtown ‘suburb’ compared to living out in a true suburb.
As well, it is difficult to quickly pivot the retail and service landscape form what has developed, support for daily commuter activities, to what is needed for a ‘complete’ neighbourhood. When a ‘big-box’ store can buy cheap land in a suburb and begin turning a profit after two years, why would it want to spend considerably more to build a store for a downtown population? Those living downtown almost all have cars and have been willing to drive out to the suburbs to do their shopping. Most ‘downtowners’ do not seem to be willing to spend considerably more to buy their food in a downtown store. Thus, any downtown stores must be in areas of maximum density of less-mobile populations – like along Rideau Street, which has many residential towers housing university students.
Just as the Crisis of Climate Change is not that the climate is changing (it is the rate of that change), the ‘crisis’ of the core dying due to Work Form Home (WFH) is due to the rate of the change. If, all of a sudden, the majority of the commuters is removed from downtown, the economic environment that has developed over many years could fail. Just as with the climate, where there are calls to slow the climate change so that ‘normal’ environmental changes can keep up, there are calls to slow the removal of commuters. That call back from WFH does not need to be a permanent thing for all workers. There has already been a concerted effort to get more residential spaces in the core, and that will continue. As that happens, the economic environment downtown will become less dependent on commuters.
We can’t expect to suddenly change an environment that has developed over 190+ years. If we want to make drastic changes – without creating a ‘crisis’ - then those changes must be done over a longer period of time.
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