Where will the next Hintonburg be?
 

With the expansion of LRT and continued growth - where will Ottawa's next up-and-coming commercial neighbourhood be? Will we see any industrial areas become trendy like Geary Ave in Toronto?

I think Bank in the Heron/Walkley area could be an interesting spot. Upgraded LRT, already has a diversity of restaurants, older warehouse/industrial buildings that can be reused, major developments nearby with Timbercreek, Distillery. I have many friends in their 30s that have moved to the surrounding neighbourhoods and really enjoy the location. The CDP envisions a lot of those industrial areas being redeveloped for residential, but I'd love to keep as non-res and encourage a diversity of uses.

Bank Street will also be turned into a complete street with bike lanes and medians
https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/do..._boards_en.pdf

Without a doubt Greely :tup::tup:

Great bones, an urban canvas just waiting for a fine brush to be applied to put the finishing touches on its urban tapesty.

Seriously....Laroche Park/Mechanicsville or Carlington or some parts of Vanier spring to mind.

Lol. Massive adaptive reuse opportunity for the old Foodland :D

Vanier has the best urban bones of those - hopefully the new street and redevelopments near Vanier Parkway/River Road can encourage growth.

Carlington has potential with rising property values - but it seems very residential with many of the homes being too small to be converted to restaurants.

Geary Avenue looked like City Centre Avenue.

Bank Street South is too post-war ugly strip mall based, and except at Walkley is too far from rapid transit. It will take decades to really change the character from auto based to a pedestrian based environment.

I think we are already seeing the transformation of Old Ottawa East.

Agreed that Bank between Billings and Walkley has potential. Still very affordable and central location (a hop away from OOS, Lansdowne, has a few transit options (LRT line 2, SE transitway and busses along major roads).

The new towers a Heron, the new towers at Walkley, turning that stretch of road to a complete street and the major redevelopment of Herongate are all projects heading in the right direction. Now they just need more condos/apartments on Bank itself and bringing some of the retail closer to the street (where there;s some streetfront parking right now).

https://postmediaottawacitizen2.file...trip=all&w=564

A lot of the other areas might surround old retail plaza (like redevelopment of Carlingwood mall and Elmvale) which might help revitalize pockets in these areas (although both of these are not really close to any rapid transit).

Nobody's suggesting Strandherd and Greenbank? SUPER trendy neighbourhood. Very walkable. lol

Merivale between Carling and Baseline. this area already has some character and good mix of zoning. Close to nice parks like Hampton Park and the Experimental Farm. Close to the Baseline RT. While Shillington has a bad reputation, soon it will be too expensive for criminals.

St-Joseph in Orleans has a lot of potential. So does St-Joseph in Hull, near the RapiBus and currently undergoing a re-build. Should the Aylmer Tramway use a south alignment, Alexandre-Taché could become trendy.

All our suburban retail streets are so auto based, and our rapid transit plans uniformly bypass them with very few exceptions. The likes of Montreal Road, St. Joseph, Innes, Bank South, St. Laurent, Merivale, Carling, Bells Corners are not going to improve dramatically unless we are serious about providing efficient and frequent transit on those corridors. Most of our plans seem to ignore that fact. Complete streets are mostly about pedestrians and cyclists and not transit riders. If we think a 15 minute walk to rapid transit is good enough, we don't understand pedestrian behaviour and how even a long empty block is enough to deter most pedestrians. We need to think back to how our main streets were created back in the days of streetcars. All those businesses were steps from streetcar stops. People of the 2020s are not so different from the 1920s in that respect. There needs to be transit convenience otherwise the car will remain king.

We really need to be conscious of this especially if COVID permanently affects commuting patterns. Part of the post-COVID assessment needs to include a review of transit plans. There is a real risk that all our fear-mongering over the pandemic will drive more people to 'safe' private vehicles and a more isolated digital lifestyle, which I believe will be unhealthy in the long run.

Places where the main street is a stroad, and the side streets are suburban in their morphology, are never going to be the "next Hintonburg" as long as those are their bones. Those are bad bones.

Easy pedestrian access to the neighbourhood is key. I know you are talking about the crescents and cul de sacs. Hopefully we are building enough of those pedestrian connections to work around that. Certainly, house density is a concern only because of the sharp decline in household sizes in the last few generations. The Bank and Wellington retail strips were all originally built around mostly single family homes on side streets.

But those side streets all intersect with the main street, and the street morphology of the side streets is a grid, not a spaghetti-string lollipop-swirl welcome-to-my-garage suburb.

As long as you have a main drag (not a main street), and as long as the side streets retain the deliberate post-war design intended to keep non-residents out, the inner circle of post-war suburbs are not going to become trendy or urban. At most, you'll see some of housing type change (as has already been happening in places like Alta Vista or the older parts of Nepean), but not much more.

And in Ottawa, there is absolutely zero public will or institutional push to even allow these suburbs to evolve, let alone be actively changed, anyway. And our new-built suburbs, despite all the precatory and empty crap in our planning goals going back to the 80s, are still essentially Don Mills. The cladding and style of houses and commercial buildings changes with each passing architectural fad of the decade, but the underlying morphology is still the same: suburban, immutable, and frozen in the year it was built. It's a stupid way to manage billions of dollars worth of real estate assets.

Ottawa's openings for "next Hintonburgs" are basically Vanier and Overbrook, maybe a few of the less-desirable neighbourhoods near Centretown, if the city doesn't frig it up, Cyrville, and that's it.

Otherwise, it's trash suburbs as far as the eye can see, the city planners can map, and the futurists can foretell.

Vanier. Definitely. It’s already happening in the north along the Beechwood corridor.

Agreed that is many ways the area is prime for Hintonburging, especially as Bank St can easily continue as an extension of Old Ottawa South just as Wellington turns into Richmond Road at some point. The main glitch is that Bank is a major commuter route from points south and the street itself is going to be really hard to turn into a bistro-lined "complete street". My wish would be to make Bank much more a transit route, with dedicated bus lanes all the way to Parliament Hill, or better yet, a Toronto-type streetcar/tram route.

It is increasingly noticeable. I keep waiting for some realtor to start tagging the area as "Lindenlea Annex" or "South Village" or some such nonsense.

They already call it "Beechwood Village". And yes, real estate prices are going up real fast.

I must admit that I thought Beechwood Village just meant the commercial strip. They’re way ahead of me.

Don't they already call it beechwood village?

Personally I'd like to see it happen to Montreal road, partly because I am in Overbrook so it would be closer, but also because it would do more to change vanier's image than beechwood, which is at the fringe.

Overbrook is seeing significant gentrification, but doesn't have a main street so it will rely on Vanier for that part of it.
Hopefully with the city redoing Montreal road and with all the new developments happening near North River road it starts to happen.

Next Hintonburg? How about St. Joseph in Gatineau?