Manor Village and LRT: my Council vote

This week, I voted at Council in favour of an alignment for the future LRT line through the Woodroffe corridor to Barrhaven. If LRT moves ahead, that alignment would require the demolition of at least some of a development called Manor Village made up of largely affordable townhomes. This has been a headline item for several weeks, and residents have asked me why I supported this.

It’s important to know that there were several options for routing the LRT. They each had pros and cons. The option Council voted for is the technically optimal route, and I accept that at face value. It allows the rail to run straight through the corridor which has several advantages including ease of construction, minimizing noise impacts, and minimizing future maintenance requirements.

However, options are available to leave Manor Village undisturbed. They’re not as optimal, but they exist.

I think my vote is best understood in terms of my understanding of how a scenario that sees an alternative chosen and Manor Village left in private hands would play out.

The development was purchased relatively recently by a developer called Smart Living, and we know that they intend to re-develop the property. That possibility was frozen for a year, maybe two, when Councillor Keith Egli was successful very recently at getting an interim control by-law applied to the area. But that will expire. At the end of that period, Smart Living will want to move ahead with a re-development. They’re lawyered up and have told Council as much.

I am very confident that the developer will – one way or another, all legal and normal-course – get a re-zoning to re-develop the property as something more profitable, denser and probably taller. It will, after all, be close to transit. We can’t legally turn down a development application on the grounds that it will mean displacing the existing tenants. Even if we try, I am certain that the developer will win a challenge at the LPAT. With a new development plan in place, the developer will pursue evictions through the Landlord and Tenant Board and that will likely leave current tenants who are unable to afford the new rents out in the cold and with a bare minimum of assistance.

We may, by the time a re-zoning is sought, have an inclusionary zoning by-law. I have little confidence, however, that that will provide existing tenants with a sufficient number of units at rents that the longest-term residents will be able to afford. And, it will not be the same building type. It won’t protect tenants from the disruption of having to move when their units are demolished.

At the end of the day, most of the tenants in Manor Village would be worse off. We could have chosen a less-than-optimal route for the LRT and left Manor Village in the hands of a private developer, the Landlord and Tenant Tribunal, and the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal. That would mean the City will have no tools to try to help those residents as re-development plans move forward.

While it is still probably 7-10 years away, though, acquiring the property at least provides some hope of tenant protections. Multiple commitments were made by way of motions at Committee and Council to explore how the affected tenants could be offered appropriate replacement housing at appropriate rents. That’s something that, if the City controls the property, it can do. There’s a lot of pieces that need to fall into place: an acquisition, the inclusion of housing funding in LRT funding (which has not been committed to by the Province or feds yet), likely some contribution of funding by the City. None of those are a guarantee today. Choosing the staff-recommended (and optimal) route is at least a first step toward that.

There’s no guarantee that the developer won’t simply move ahead with re-development of Manor Village in advance of the City’s ability to offer at least some help and this may all be moot. But my vote yesterday was in favour of a path that will both help us try to help Manor Village residents and to ensure the LRT is optimally routed.

I get the criticism. The optics are bad of voting in favour of an LRT route that would require the expropriation and demolition of housing that, for many residents, is affordable in the midst of a housing crisis - even if that day is many years off. I spent time with residents and significant time in conversation with colleagues about this issue, vacillating on it even from my support for the staff recommendation at committee.

At the end of the day, and confident in my understanding of what is likely to transpire in the coming months and years for residents of Manor Village if left in private hands, I cannot escape the conclusion that choosing a different route would result in worse outcomes for everyone. The issues that face Manor Village residents are more immediate than LRT, and that was very much on my mind as I voted.