Urban boundary expansion in Ottawa

Last February, I wrote a post about the debate over expanding the urban boundary (here). In it, I noted that the discussion comes down to a decision about how much intensification will be needed to accommodate the population growth that we anticipate between now and 2046. Today, we know a lot more about what that might look like, and next week Council will vote on a very specific proposal to expand the urban boundary (find that here).

I want to make clear at the outset that I am opposed, after reading the report, to that expansion. Intensification is controversial. It’s often not handled thoughtfully. But, it’s the only way to build a sustainable city.

When we expand the lands available for development, we increase the costs to all residents of servicing those areas. There are more roads, more fire stations, more libraries, more water and sewage pipes. The cost of building those may be (largely) passed on to new homebuyers in greenfield suburban developments, but the ongoing costs of maintaining those assets and servicing them with transit becomes a tax burden on everyone. 

The environmental cost of generating even more car trips would be the wrong direction given our ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals (not to mention more traffic congestion added to existing suburban flows if transit can't keep up). If an expansion is into agricultural lands (and the City has not taken that off the table in its proposal), we threaten food security. But even if an expansion is not into agricultural land, we disrupt important ecosystems and contribute to wildlife habitat destruction.

The proposal before us is to expand the developable area of Ottawa. City staff have done their analysis and determined that there is not enough room left in the lands we’ve already designated for development and the intensification would be too much to accommodate the number of households we need. I think it’s worth looking at those assumptions.

First, staff have concluded that Ottawa will need to accommodate 195,000 households to house around 400,000 new residents. Some of those will be accommodated in places like rural villages, which are also growing. Within the urban area, they’ve determined we’ll need 181,900 units, as follows:

The argument that our staff have made is that these units can’t be accommodated entirely within the existing urban area (the built-up area plus inventory of lands designated, but not yet built).

In order to accommodate growth without expanding the area of developable land in the city, staff have suggested it would have to look as follows:

Before dealing with those arguments, I believe strongly that one of the exercises we have to undertake is to understand whether the assumptions on which they’re based are the only way to look at the issue. I’d argue it’s not. And, I would focus on the number of single-family homes that are presumed to be required.The arguments against this scenario sees our staff argue that we don’t have the zoning in place, haven’t historically achieved this level of intensification, still need to evaluate our infrastructure to see if this level of intensification could be handled, residents are not prepared to accept this level of intensification, and that developers need time to develop housing types that respond to market demand.

Single family homes still hold a special place in the hearts of North Americans, but they are a product of a different time. The suburbs of old that emphasized a single-family home on a single lot were only possible because of the private automobile, and the road and highway networks built to support them. Large tracts of old single-family homes can’t be served economically with transit, and their density almost by definition precludes the kind of 15-minute neighbourhoods that cities across North America are trying to achieve.

I believe strongly that the assumptions built into the plan are driving fundamentally higher intensification numbers than will actually be required. That’s being driven by the premise that we need to satisfy a demand for single family homes. The report doesn’t provide us with any scenarios about different responses to the demand for singles.

I don’t pretend to have a fully fleshed-out scenario to offer as an alternative. But, working with the numbers provided in the report, I’ve developed a scenario that sees all but 15,000 of those foreseen singles replaced with semi-detached, row and apartment units (bearing in mind that many apartments can be accommodated in low-rise buildings).

If we allocate the space it would take to build those singles to 1/3 semi, 1/3 row, and 1/3 apartment, we arrive at the following:

This would allow for a far number of units to be built. If we assume the greenfield units move forward, and subtract the excess units from the overall requirements, the numbers required as intensification units changes dramatically:

We can compare this to what the “balanced” scenario presented by staff has been deemed to be, one that expands the urban boundary by an area one and half times the size of Kitchissippi:

In other words, only 5,481 more intensification units are required in a scenario that replaces singles with a mix of semis, rows and apartments than one in which the full complement of singles is built with many of those in an expanded urban boundary.

There are other ways we can play with the numbers. Semi-detached homes in greenfield developments have an assumed density of 35.6 units/ha. But if those are built with secondary dwelling units, the overall residential density rises. It’s an interesting and potentially endless exercise.

As I’ve noted, this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive analysis, but I wanted to demonstrate how questioning our assumptions might lead to different conclusions. I don’t take it as a given that we need to expand our urban area to accommodate growth – as long as we don’t take it as a given that growth needs to look like growth always has.