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Posted Aug 30, 2013, 11:52 PM
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Join Date: May 2010
Location: Toronto
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Good news. The NCC is looking to revise the plan for Lebreton Flats to include tall buildings.
Quote:
Just Build it Already: LeBreton Flats
NCC about to re-think the plan for the LeBreton Flats
By David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen August 30, 2013 6:56 PM
Just Build it Already: An Ongoing Ottawa Citizen Series
Ottawa’s never been short on big ideas, but we always seem to fall short when it comes to making them happen. In this series, the Citizen’s City Hall bureau checks in on some of the apparently good ideas that still haven’t made it off the drawing board.
LeBreton Flats
The idea: Redevelop the long-fallow land west of Parliament Hill into the modern urban neighbourhood it might have been if it hadn’t been razed in the 1960s.
The cost: Untold
The problem: Cleaning up the land and lingering over design details has consumed so much time that urban-planning thinking has passed the existing plan by.
The status: The National Capital Commission is planning a re-think of the plan for the Flats, possibly to include much taller buildings in light of the impending light-rail system.
OTTAWA — Ten years after the National Capital Commission started selling land for development on LeBreton Flats, it’s about to re-evaluate its plan for the prime property in the shadow of Parliament Hill.
“The density of buildings is probably one thing that would be a good course” for re-evaluation, says François Lapointe, the NCC’s chief urban planner. He’s supremely careful not to prejudge the conclusion, but he rhymes off reasons why that needs another look: the city’s new plan for the escarpment area in northwest Centretown that overlooks the Flats, its plan for the Bayview area, its transit-oriented development plans for new light-rail stations east of downtown.
What do they all have in common? Zoning that allows very tall buildings by Ottawa standards, of 30 storeys and more. The NCC’s plan for LeBreton Flats calls for buildings that max out at about 12 floors.
“We don’t feel that we at the NCC right now, that we are the older … that we necessarily know what’s best,” Lapointe says. “We feel we need to engage with the community, with the city, with the developers to have a plan to make it an area that’s really world class.”
There’s a “window of opportunity,” he says, with the last work underway on removing contaminated soil from LeBreton Flats’s industrial past and the city’s contractor finally starting work on the new light-rail line with excavations at the Flats’ southeast corner. A review of the plan could take about two years, with more land ready to be put up for bids a year or so after that.
Land zoned for tall buildings is, of course, much more valuable than land zoned for shorter ones. The commission, perennially strapped for cash, has cut jobs this year as it deals with federal budget reductions and then suffered a humiliation later in the spring when the government decided to transfer its cultural branch to the Department of Canadian Heritage.
When that decision was made in March, the minister in charge of the agency, Ottawa West-Nepean MP John Baird, said publicly he wasn’t thrilled with what the NCC had done at LeBreton Flats to that point.
“We’ve got to dream a little bigger than just having a bunch of condos in the last big part of undeveloped land in downtown Ottawa,” Baird said at the time.
Lapointe says he and the commission have taken that criticism to heart and want to do better.
The NCC took control of LeBreton Flats in 1964, mostly be expropriating the homes and businesses there with the intention of replacing a working-class neighbourhood with a glittering government office complex. Then, for 40 years, not much happened, with changing government priorities ruling out construction of the offices and jurisdictional battles between the NCC and the City of Ottawa ruling out anything else. Finally, in 1999, the commission and the city reached a deal and the city handed over its land, mostly useless roads comprising almost a quarter of the Flats, to the NCC for a wholesale redesign.
The commission has since sunk almost $100 million into the Flats, divided almost evenly between new infrastructure such as water pipes and getting rid of old pollution in the ground.
By 2004, the Flats were getting exciting. The triumphant Canadian War Museum was nearing completion on the northern part of the Flats, dedicated to national-level uses, and by the end of the year Claridge Homes had made a deal with the NCC to buy a chunk of property in the south, under strict conditions, to start returning residents to the land.
The conditions were extremely strict, with detailed design guidelines and other requirements so onerous that, in the end, Claridge was the only bidder left standing from an original list of six.
Lapointe recognizes that’s not ideal. Claridge bought a section of land at the east edge of the Flats that’s supposed to hold 800 condos and townhouses, which made it too big and expensive for all but the biggest development companies to even contemplate.
And even so, the first phase, Claridge’s phase, has moved a little more slowly than the company expected, concedes vice-president Neil Malhotra. But he points out that the last few years included the worst recession since the Great Depression (“there was a six-month period where the world was just a total zero”) and several revisions of the light-rail line that’s finally under construction just south of Claridge’s property on the Flats.
“There have been a lot of changes in the world of Ottawa,” Malhotra says. “The train’s a reality now and we’re trying to understand what that’s going to mean down there.” Things like who’ll ride the train? Where will they be going? Will that affect who’s interested in living close to the new LeBreton station, and what sorts of homes you can sell them?
The LRT also comes with mundane but important considerations such as whether it’ll run over or under Booth Street, which affects what Claridge builds right next to the road. Ground-level townhouses won’t make sense if they’re facing an overpass. Those questions are nearing answers, though. “When they’re finished the Booth Street bridge, I think we’ll be at the stage where we’re ready to build,” Malhotra says.
A second block of Claridge land is finally under construction, with about 120 new units to join the 350 or so in the pair of condo buildings Claridge has already built and sold. Malhotra is well aware of the criticism the existing buildings get: they’re blocky, a bland brown colour, ordinary, not what we expected after waiting 40 years for the right redevelopment project.
“They’re actually not designed for the guy driving by in the car,” Malhotra responds. They’re designed to be attractive close up, with a courtyard you can’t see if you’re whizzing past on the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway. More importantly, they’re out of context, due to be surrounded by other buildings in a pedestrian neighbourhood that hasn’t been built yet.
“Ottawa’s not like Toronto, where a community like that could just pop up,” he says. Though the market has slowed there, Torontonians have bought 25,000 condos a year for several years; Ottawa’s builders sell 5,000 homes a year of all kinds and it’s only recently that young families have started to think of condo life as an acceptable way to start out. When Claridge sold its first LeBreton Flats condos for $400,000 to $500,000, they cost as much as a house with a lawn in Westboro; now that real estate like that is a lot more expensive, condominiums are a lot more competitive.
LeBreton Flats is also getting knitted more thoroughly into the city, with a plan settled for the escarpment district of northwest Centretown to the east, another one coming together for Bayview and Mechanicsville to the west, and now a possible proposal for Chaudière Island to the north. That will make the area a lot more attractive to potential buyers, particularly once years of work to remove contaminated soil has ended and the LRT has been built.
“There’s no real backdrop to the pedestrian environment,” Malhotra says. “I mean, it looks like the moon.”
Unsurprisingly for a builder whose company has led the charge for taller buildings in Ottawa, Malhotra is plenty interested in updating the plan for the district. The existing plan took into account things such as the capacity of the sewers to handle new residents’ washing and flushing, but 10 years later, more efficient appliances are using less water.
“I mean, 10 years ago dual-flush toilets were high-tech,” Malhotra says. “Now they’re pretty much standard. … The speed of technological change is just amazing and it makes a real difference in what you can do.”
That’s the sort of thing that needs considering before the NCC sells more land, whether it’s to Claridge or someone else. “Our aim is really to make this a world-class successful place,” Lapointe says.
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