360 Kennedy Ln E | 11m | 3f | Appealed

[rocketphish]

United Property Resource Corporation is proposing the redevelopment of the 1.22 hectare Queenswood United Church property located at 360 Kennedy Lane East, Orleans, in the City of Ottawa. The proposed redevelopment will include a mix of three storey townhouses and three storey walk-up apartments, all of rental tenure, as well as the retention of the existing church. A total of 81 residential units are proposed, of which 31% are to be affordable units. Three-storey walkup apartments are proposed on the Subject Lands, consisting of 60 dwelling units, including 20 one-bedroom units and 40 two-bedroom units. Three storey townhouses are also proposed on the Subject Lands, consisting of 21 three-bedroom units.

The intent of the proposed development is to provide a much-needed mix of affordable and market rate rental housing on underutilized portions of the Subject Lands in the form of three-storey townhouses and three storey walkups. As part of the proposed development, the existing church structure is planned to remain on the Subject Lands to continue to serve as a local place of worship, as well as to serve as a community centre offering programming and community space to residents of both the proposed development and surrounding neighbourhood.

Architect: KPMB Architects


Development application:
https://devapps.ottawa.ca/en/applica...2-0002/details

Location:








Siteplan:




Renderings:

[Harley613]

This looks like it would be in Hendrick's Farm in Chelsea, not Orleans.

[Proof Sheet]

Lots and lots of 'rendering' people in those images. I've never seen such a busy townhouse complex and I think the Planning Rationale report could give the dominant outfit a run for their money in terms of the # of pages.

[waterloowarrior]

Quite an interesting proposal (love the look!) using a high-end architect for townhomes and keeping the church as well. The parking reduction (21 spaces less than what is required) will be the #1 issue at the public meeting I'm guessing, with only 30-minute peak bus service currently available. Hopefully, the fact that it's affordable housing will not be brought up in a negative context.....

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by waterloowarrior

Quite an interesting proposal (love the look!) using a high-end architect for townhomes and keeping the church as well. The parking reduction (21 spaces less than what is required) will be the #1 issue at the public meeting I'm guessing, with only 30-minute peak bus service currently available. Hopefully, the fact that it's affordable housing will not be brought up in a negative context.....

I think you've hit the nail on the head on the parking issue. The community will all be of the position that 'everyone' has two cars and 'everybody' leaves and arrives at the same time creating traffic chaos and slowing down the people in the neighbourhood getting to where 'they' want to go. When I think of 'affordable' housing the look of these units is not what I think of.

Hopefully this gets approved and could trigger some transit improvements.

[J.OT13]

The one time where I'd be fine with the demolition of the church. What a wretched looking building.

Overall, I'm liking this proposal. Great architecture, all brick as opposed to the cookie-cutter siding crap we see all over the place. Good parking ratio, and well spread out instead of a massive surface parking lot in the middle.

I expect a heck of a lot of opposition however, but based on Luloff's voting history, he may support anyway.

[DEWLine]

Is Queenswood United moving, or shutting down?

Either way, this looks like a helpful thing.

[rocketphish]

Kindred Works sets out new approach to solving Canada's housing crisis

News provided by Kindred Works

May 02, 2022, 08:00 ET


TORONTO, May 2, 2022 /CNW/ - Kindred Works is a newly launched, independent company that is reimagining development, addressing the housing crisis in Canada by providing mixed-income homes with the goal of housing 34,000 people over the next 15 years.

Its nationwide portfolio will transform existing buildings and properties in larger urban and small communities, providing community gathering spaces as well as homes.

One third of its housing units will be available to rent at below market prices. All units will be rental. Currently, Kindred Works has eight projects in active pre-development representing 600 homes, and the pipeline will expand to 1,500 homes by end of year

Tim Blair, CEO of Kindred Works, says the company's vision is driven by the belief that housing provides the most fundamental and lasting way for people to thrive - and can also be good for business.

"We are demonstrating that it's possible to provide equal benefits for your business, for the people you serve, for wider society and the environment" says Mr. Blair.

The company's vision is also grounded in its genesis.

It acts as the development and asset manager for United Property Resource Corporation (UPRC), which was founded two years ago by the United Church of Canada to help ensure its church properties continue to serve the common good.

Kindred Works is taking this vision one step farther, however, by leveraging the expertise from UPRC and collaborating with a wide range of other organizations, experts, investors, and individuals – from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to architectural firms, sustainability leaders to community and culture creators, with the view that each adds a unique perspective on solving the housing crisis.

A sustainable and inclusive company, Kindred Works is aiming to spend at least 80 per cent of its project costs with local labour and businesses and 10 per cent of its labour hours with equity seeking groups.

By 2030, Kindred Works' goal is to produce 80 per cent less carbon in construction than today's industry standard.

For each project, Kindred Works will collaborate with neighbourhood stakeholders to ensure that gathering spaces are part of the developments to provide services for both existing and new neighbours and partners.

And Kindred Works will act as a steward for the spaces it builds – creating and taking care of them for the people who live and gather in these places for generations to come.

As part of its unique development model, each of Kindred Works' projects combine market-rate and below-market-rate rental housing, the profits of which create a solid financial foundation.

In addition, its portfolio approach, in which projects are considered together, lets Kindred Works access more funding opportunities, and streamline its design and construction process.

This allows it to make the most of sites across Canada that couldn't otherwise be developed and bring opportunities to more people.

Kindred Works active projects include:

• St Luke's United Church, Toronto
• Church of the Master United Church, Toronto
• Wexford Heights United Church, Toronto
• Wilmar Heights United Church, Toronto
• Queenswood United Church, Ottawa
• Regent Park United Church, Orillia
• Westminster United Church, St. Catharines
• Portland United Church, Saint John NB

OUR TARGETS

34000: We plan to deliver rental housing for 34,000 people over the next 15 years
2030: We're working to be a Net Positive Company by 2030
1/3: Our goal is that more than one third of the homes in our portfolio will be available to rent below market rate
$4: We're targeting a $4 social return on investment (SROI) for every dollar we spend on a project
80%: We aim to spend at least 80% of our project costs with local labour and businesses
10%: Our target is for at least 10% of the labour hours on our projects to be new jobs filled by equity-seeking groups
30%: Our target is for 30% of our projects to be Universal Design – accessible for all
-80%: By 2030, we aim to produce 80% less carbon in construction than today's industry standard
-65%: We're working to build our homes so they use 65% less energy per year than today's industry standard

SOURCE Kindred Works

For further information: PRESS CONTACT: Anna Woodmass T +1 416-571-2147, awoodmass@national.ca

https://www.newswire.ca/news-release...834924041.html

[rocketphish]

United Church to transform its properties into rental apartments

Alex Bozikovic, Architecture Critic
The Globe and Mail
May 2, 2022 | Published 5 hours ago

The line for the food bank stretched out for half a block in downtown Toronto. Scores of people stood patiently along the sandstone façade of St. Luke’s United Church, all waiting for their chance to be served. Across the street stood half a dozen people who are planning to redevelop the church.

But even with the redevelopment, the food bank won’t be going anywhere, said Tim Blair, chief executive officer of Kindred Works, a real estate company associated with the United Church of Canada. “We are going to create an ecosystem in which this place is serving many people.”

Kindred Works has a goal to transform the church’s properties across Canada. This includes renewing church facilities and housing 34,000 people over the next 15 years in new rental apartments. One-third of these will be below-market rentals, with financing from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. KPMB Architects are the lead designers for all of these projects.

Kindred Works now has eight projects – which will include 600 homes – in the planning process: four in Toronto; one in Saint John; and one each in Ottawa, St. Catharines and Orillia, Ont. By the end of the year, Mr. Blair says, this will expand to 20 projects and 1,500 homes.

This is the most wide-reaching solution yet to a growing challenge of finding uses for old churches. Canada has about 28,000 churches, a large number of which are underused and in danger of closing. Many individual congregations have sold all or part of their facilities to fund repairs and operations. One non-profit, the Trinity Centres Foundation, has a goal of preserving and repurposing churches of all denominations.

But Kindred Works aims to do such work on a unprecedented scale. “We are trying to pioneer an approach to property development that creates social, economic and sustainability benefits for everyone,” Mr. Blair said. He started working with the United Church in 2020 after years in real estate banking and private equity.

Of their initial projects, St. Luke’s is the most complex. First built in 1887 as the Sherbourne Street Methodist Church, it represents the dominance of Protestant churches in Anglo-Canadian society of the time. Toronto architects Langley & Burke designed it in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with a sanctuary that seats 800. Soon it was known as “the millionaires’ church,” and served Toronto’s most prestigious neighbourhood.

All that changed when the Methodist Church merged into the United Church in the 1920s. In the following generations, church attendance in general dropped dramatically. Today, St. Luke’s has a congregation of about 200. The sanctuary shows clear signs of physical decline. Years of roof leaks – recently repaired, Mr. Blair said – have eroded the plaster on the ceiling and walls, revealing the lath and masonry underneath.

“This is a big barn of a space,” architect Marianne McKenna of KPMB said as the church’s stained-glass windows refracted the afternoon sun into pale blues and pinks. “It’s too big for the current congregation. But we also think of it as a larger community space, one where the church can bring people in to do all sorts of events, one that can be part of the life of the city.”

KPMB’s solution, designed with the heritage specialists ERA Architects, rethinks the entire church complex. Their plan keeps the original 1887 building, and mostly demolishes a series of later additions. In their place, the architects imagine a 12-storey building that contains 100 homes, 20 of them with three bedrooms.

This would wrap two sides of the original church and also reach one arm above its roof. A new square would widen the sidewalk out front on Sherbourne Street, where food bank patrons line up. And a new café and rentable event space would provide income for the church and also bring more people into the building. “There’s an opportunity,” Ms. McKenna said, “for an integrated community that is more than the sum of its parts.”

The United Church also has many suburban properties, mostly congregations that were created in the years after the Second World War. One of these, Wexford Heights United in the former Toronto borough of Scarborough, is another Kindred Works project.

Here KPMB has designed an 11-storey apartment building with a gabled roof and two rows of townhouses, while planning to keep the oldest portion of the church building intact. “We’re taking different approaches to different sites,” said David Constable, a principal at KPMB. “And thinking about the entire portfolio allows us to explore different options for approaches to space, to materials, to pursue lower carbon in the building components.”

The approach of Kindred Works to real estate development, pursuing some degree of profit while serving the mandate of a charitable organization, is complex. Markee Developments, where former Toronto chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat is a partner, is one peer organization.

Mr. Blair suggested that having the United Church continue to own its facilities presents opportunities for economic integration and for a mix of activities that for-profit development cannot provide.

“We want this space to function for generations to come, to deliver the openness and the social impact it had in the past,” Mr. Blair said of St. Luke’s. “And we understand that Canada is facing an unprecedented housing crisis. We think we can be part of the solution.”

Follow Alex Bozikovic on Twitter: @alexbozikovic

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...ts-properties/

[J.OT13]

Wish they had more info on the Orleans proposal.

[J.OT13]

The St. Luke's proposal in Toronto. If that and the Orleans proposals are any indication, we might have a fantastic new player in town. Heritage preservation (though the Orleans church is certainly not heritage) and great architecture.

Originally Posted by JHikka

United Church to transform its properties into rental apartments
Alex Bozikovic
May 2, 2022[I]


St. Luke's United, Toronto

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...ts-properties/

[rocketphish]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Wish they had more info on the Orleans proposal.

I guess the Orleans proposal is the development of the vacant land, not the unimpressive church building.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

I guess the Orleans proposal is the development of the vacant land, not the unimpressive church building.

Not quite the same level for sure. Hope to see them develop around heritage churches in central Ottawa in the coming years.

[rocketphish]

Orléans church set to be transformed into rental housing by United Church-affiliated company
Queenswood is part of a portfolio of church sites slated for residential redevelopment by Kindred Works

Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
May 10, 2022 • 13 minutes ago • 4 minute read



From yoga classes to band practice to rental by another faith community, Queenswood United Church in Orléans has long offered up its small chapel space for uses beyond its own 100-person congregation.

So it might be a big step, but it’s not a stretch to see why the church has decided to transform its property into a place where people from the community can live.

Queenswood is part of a portfolio of church sites slated for residential redevelopment by Kindred Works, a new company founded by a United Church of Canada investment “to help reimagine their properties across the country and make sure that they continue to deliver social impact as they have in generations past,” according to CEO Tim Blair.

The company is aiming to create homes for 34,000 people over the next 15 years, drawing on financing from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s National Housing Co-Investment Fund (NHCF) and United Church sites around the country.

Leveraging church properties to create mixed-income rental housing doesn’t just create new options for tenants amidst an affordable housing crisis. It’s also a way to secure the future of the churches themselves and the buildings they offer their surrounding communities.

“As we see places of worship closing, that’s community space that’s lost forever,” said Blair. “If we can create this financially sustainable ecosystem on each property, we’re able to maintain the community space and make it accessible to the broader community for use.”

The Queenswood United Church redevelopment is one of Kindred Works’ eight active projects, and the only one in eastern Ontario, for now. The church has offered up its 1.2-hectare property, located in a low-density suburban area near St. Joseph Boulevard and Tenth Line Road, backing onto Queenswood Ridge Park. The church will receive a portion of profit derived from the project,”and then we’ll be in a position to sustain our congregation, but also to give back even more to the community,” said Rose Marie MacLennan, chair of Queenswood’s property development committee.

According to Blair, all profit from Kindred Works projects will ultimately be “reinvested back into community at the local level,” done largely by the local community of faith.

The Queenswood project proposal is for a mix of three-storey townhouses and three-storey walk-up apartments, totalling 81 residential rental units of one-, two- and three-bedroom types, while maintaining the existing church and the use of its space by community members.

Thirty-one per cent of the housing units would be “affordable,” as defined by the CMHC NHCF program, with rents set at 79 per cent of median market rent.

Blair said Kindred Works wants to partner on projects with local housing organizations who can both provide tenants for the below-market rent units, and help deepen their affordability, while the company would serve as the properties’ long-term landlord.

According to an application to rezone the Queenswood site from its current minor institutional designation, which should come before city councillors for a vote in the coming months, the developer has also proposed 400 square metres of “outdoor amenity area,” including a community garden, and 85 surface parking spaces.

KPMB Architects has been working with Kindred Works to create what KPMB principal David Constable described as a “playbook” for its development portfolio, saving time and money, and allowing for builds in small communities where “it wouldn’t be viable to hire a group of architects or all the consultants needed to do the project.”

Queenswood and the other projects like it will have sustainability priorities baked into their design, such as a goal of zero onsite carbon emissions, solar panels and geothermal heating and cooling, said Constable, as well as quality, long-lasting materials.

“We’re not trying to put up stucco boxes that in five years will look sort of terrible. We’re … trying to put up buildings that in 50 or 100 years will be a good part of the community that people are happy to have there.”

Kindred Works has also articulated an aim of spending 80 per cent of its project costs, at minimum, with local labour and businesses, and allocating at least 10 per cent of project labour hours to new jobs filled by those from equity-seeking groups.

While the bulk of the company’s work at present is on United Church properties, Blair said they’re offering development and management services to other denominations and non-profits.

At Queenswood, MacLennan said there’s been a desire dating back years for the mission of the church to include affordable housing, and the creation of the Kindred Works offered up an attractive partnership opportunity.

“We feel connected and aligned that (from) a project development point of view, from a values point of view, we’re there. We’re together. And that means a great deal when you’re trying to plan property development,” she said.

She believes the redevelopment plan has excited and energized members of their church. But the goal for Queenswood United, MacLennan noted, is not to grow their congregation. “This is really for the community and the common good.”

tblewett@postmedia.com
twitter.com/tayblewett

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...liated-company

[Truenorth00]

That council voted against this says it all. I hope the province brings the hammer down on this ridiculous hick town.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

That council voted against this says it all. I hope the province brings the hammer down on this ridiculous hick town.

They voted in favour of delaying the file while they try to negotiate more parking (61 spaces for 85 units deemed too little), not against the proposal per say. Still not good.

Leiper, Gower, Johnson, Kavanaugh and Troster voted against the delay, while Kitts, Darouze, Luloff, Dudas, Curry, Brockington and Kelly voted in favour of the delay. Tierney was not present for the vote.

[Kramata]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

They voted in favour of delaying the file while they try to negotiate more parking (61 spaces for 85 units deemed too little), not against the proposal per say. Still not good.

Leiper, Gower, Johnson, Kavanaugh and Troster voted against the delay, while Kitts, Darouze, Luloff, Dudas, Curry, Brockington and Kelly voted in favour of the delay. Tierney was not present for the vote.

According to Dean Tester on twitter it appears to be a smoke screen. The council members brought forth petitions that were more concerned about home values and calling the affordable housing invasive.

From this Twitter thread.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Kramata

According to Dean Tester on twitter it appears to be a smoke screen. The council members brought forth petitions that were more concerned about home values and calling the affordable housing invasive.

From this Twitter thread.

I wouldn't be surprised. Pretty tired of hearing about "home values". In a market like Ottawa's, it really doesn't matter. Home values rise and fall with the Federal public service and high-tech, along with interest rates, not with what gets built nearby (other than maybe a tower that puts your house in perpetual darkness, which isn't the case here).

[Truenorth00]

I'd like to see the mayor use his new override powers to overrule this. Situations like this, are exactly what those powers were meant for.

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

They voted in favour of delaying the file while they try to negotiate more parking (61 spaces for 85 units deemed too little), not against the proposal per say. Still not good.

The councillors used parking to mask their true intention, that being that they don't want more affordable housing in this neighbourhood, or anywhere for that matter.