This is the third of a multi-part series that will follow environmentalists Chris Henschel and Allegra Newman as they share their first-hand experiences dealing with an intensification project directly affecting their own residence near Island Park Drive.
Before the holidays I attended a community meeting regarding the condo development behind our house. The neighbours had concerns about both this particular condo and the planned intensification of the broader Wellington West neighbourhood. Listening to my neighbours discuss their concerns, I realized that most people don’t know how urban planning decisions are made or how to get involved in contributing to such strategies as the community design plan.
Also misunderstood is the idea of intensification. To most people at this meeting, the word intensification is a dirty one associated with tower blocks and the perceived ills that come with an area becoming more like “downtown”. What about the increased walkability of a neighbourhood that results from intensification? Wouldn’t we all like our neighbourhood better with improved transit and more services? The positive ideas behind intensification were not clarified by the City Councillor, Christine Leadman, although she did mention that intensification required better transit service to the area.
Now, back to the issue of the condo in our backyard. There is growing and extensive opposition to the planned use of Rockhurst, currently a back street, as the entrance to the condo. I believe that there will be enough community pressure to force the City to put the entrance off of Wellington. The councillor is onside and I think with pressure from her, as well as a petition circulated through the community, the City will be forced to allow access to the site from Wellington. The architect had not yet considered what a revising of the entrance would do to the rest of the design so we will have to wait and see what impact this change will have on our house.
Our focus will be mostly on making sure the design of the parking lot at the back, the building itself and the barriers are built to our requirements. Because the site is on bedrock it is almost impossibly expensive to build another parking garage story and this is why many larger developers have thought twice about building here. The property has been for sale for more than two years for this reason even though it is a prime location.
Because we live directly north of the condo the loss of light is a major issue for us, as well as our neighbour to the west. It is noon in January and I am taking immense enjoyment the light streaming in our windows. The shadow studies for this date show that we will be in full shadow during this time of year.
photo by Jim Trodel
11 comments
Pay attention to the kind of HVAC, Air Conditioning and other machinery they plan to use. Sound pollution caused by a large building’s operating machinery also can diminish the quality of the neighbourhood. A renovated 12 storey building in the Glebe has provided the neighbourhood with an AC drone hovering near 50 DB all summer long; this noise is totally within City of Ottawa’s woefully inadequate bylaws. Low Frequency Noise (LFN) causes sleep disorders among significant numbers of the population at 40 DB.
I’m all for intensification – it’s the right thing to do – but it must be done right and our city is not well prepared. Unfortunately, building codes and bylaw guidelines are often written by the construction industry, and not well understood by politicians. City staff simply enforce the going rules and regard citizen complaints as whiny cranks.
Try to do as much as you can now. Trying to fix anything after the fact is expensive to residents – on whom the burden falls -, exhausting, and generally provides unsatisfactory results. But the more that people inform themselves and get involved, the better. Good Luck.
SPetzold.
Maybe I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but putting vehicular access on Wellington means that the flow of ground-level retail is interrupted by a garage entrance, and (ideally high) pedestrian traffic can be disrupted by cars entering and leaving the garage. For this reason, I believe parking access is generally prohibited off of Traditional Mainstreets (which is the current site’s zoning). Looking at the Google Map, it’s also right near a pretty busy intersection, and if I were a traffic planner with a choice I’d want to avoid adding to the confusion with a parking entrance/exit–particularly an underground one which might not have the same visibility as the extant surface parking lot.
(Plus, as Eric Darwin recently observed, the sidewalk often bows down to cars causing an icy and/or wet slope for pedestrians in the Winter and Spring.)
All that said, I wish the best for the neighbourhood, the City and the developer to find a solution that’s considered reasonable for all.
To Shiela Petold: Thanks for your very helpful advice Shiela. We have been thinking about the machinery. In the Glebe example, is the machinery on the roof or at ground level? Thanks!
Part of the attractiveness of the west wellie intensification has been the small size of the “boutique” condo infills. The buildings are not large blocks like so much of the public housing towers built in the previous go-around.
That small scale generates its own problems, including the need for frequent garage entrances which are the same size whether for a 30 unit or 100 unit building. The two condo bldgs proposed just east of Island Park are by the same architect, same developer … but are separated by a single lot occupied by a restaurant. The potential multistorey redevelopment of the restuarant lot is impaired by being sandwiched between the apartments. Some headbashing needs to be done to persuade the restaurant to sell to the developer, to then own/occupy the ground floor of the condo or a podium structure connecting the two buildings, and then both buildings would be serviced by one parking garage and one entrance on the east side.
-Eric Darwin, WestSideAction.blogspot.com
To Eric: I see what you mean about the restaurant but I can confirm it is not the same developer.
To Charles A-M: Accesses are not prohibited off of traditional mainstreets – the guidelines say that it is preferred to have them off of side streets. That being said, I believe the car wash that currently occupies the site has higher traffic than the condo would. Therefore a condo access on Wellington would already decrease current traffic. Given this, I do not see a strong argument in favour of *increasing* the traffic on a dead-end neighbourhood street. Make sense?
I have to say that I very much agree with Charles. If the condo development would create very little traffic, why not allow it off the non-mainstreet? It is much more convenient for the new condo owners who can then more directly access Wellington or Scott street, better for the environment (no idling as cars wait for an opening in both pedestrian and vehicular traffic on Wellington), safer (no conflict with Wellington pedestrians), and more conducive to creating an inviting environment on Wellington as it redevelops (if such entrances are not prohibited on traditional mainstreets, for this reason alone they should be).
I don’t believe the minimal traffic increase on the residential street (and please note that this would be residential traffic, and suitable for such an area) should be allowed to outweigh the comparatiely larger negative impacts of access on Wellington.
I agree with Charles. Even I the proposed Wellington enterance doesn’t increase traffic, a huge opportunity to improve Wellington by reducing traffic is being missed. Is there some way to compensate you win mney for the inconveniene of a side street entrance. It’s a sham to lose a city buildin opportunity because of a Nimby confer (even a legitimate one)
Charles, Philip and Anonymous:
I can certainly see your points about the access on Wellington. However, this process is already teaching me that there is a trade-off between what might be the best urban design solution and what works for affected neighourhoods. That’s why I’m so keen to sit down with the developer and others to balance all these issues and come up with the optimal outcomes.
chris.
What worries me is the possible creation of canyons when both sides of a street end up with tall buildings (think Albert and Slater down town. (Note: The tallest building in the westen part of inner Ottawa is the Metropole where the zoning allowed high density and the height was achieved by a variance noy a zoning change, However the owner went on to construct low-rise townhouses around the east side of the tower and the distance from Scott Street and its siting on a bit of an angle suggests it will unlikely be part of a canyon) On the other hand the fact that a curtain of tall buildings seems likely to be found on the north side of Wellington from Carleton Avenue west to almost Kirkwood and that the convent property across from the old Canadian Tire store is also to be developped suggests we might end up with a canyon on Wellington in that area. That possibility should be made an improbability by careful attention to each development but also possibly by pre-emptive action by the city by expropriating air rights above the current zoning now. They could later be auctioned in a fashion that canyons are avoided.
I’m not really too worried about ‘canyons’ per se but that’s just me. Aesthetically I think it works to have 8-10 story buildings; it looks fabulous in some of the great European cities. But I think it depends on a practical assessment of impacts, for example the shadow we are concerned about on our house.
So I did some surfing and there are several practical dimensions to the ‘urban canyon effect: effect on radio signals, penetration of light, wind speed, temperature, air quality [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_canyon].
And I found this paper from Brazil that makes the obvious point that the effect depends on the relationship between building height and street width: http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jaabe/8/2/8_447/_article.
The City of Ottawa design guidelines for traditional mainstreets acknowledges this implicitly and suggests a ratio of building height to street width of between 1:2 and 1:3 (page 5) [http://ottawa.ca/residents/planning/design_plan_guidelines/completed/traditional_mainstreets/index_en.html] .
Someone should crunch the numbers for all the proposed condo developments along this part of Wellington and Richmond and see whether they fall within that range!
As soon as I saw that picture I knew it was the Wikipedia image for Hong Kong.