If you’re not already familiar with Engage Ottawa, it’s a good site to know. For example, City planning staff are currently working on a new comprehensive Zoning By-law to implement the policies and directions in the new Official Plan. The new Zoning By-law will replace the current Zoning By-law (By-law 2008-250). The new by-law won’t go to Council for approval until 2025, but Engage Ottawa lets you make your thoughts known now about the policies behind it at https://engage.ottawa.ca/zoning, specifically, through seven discussion papers with related surveys. Somebody said the discussion papers are like the Five Big Moves policy documents that the City used for engagement on the Official Plan. The deadline is July 28, 2023.
The plan for re-development
As you probably know, the City is trying to avoid urban sprawl and keep within our boundaries the over 40% more people we expect to add by 2046. That’s a good thing. Staying within Ottawa’s boundaries will be cheaper and healthier and aid the fight against climate change.
In the Outer Urban area to which Crystal Beach Lakeview belongs, a big part of the intensification is planned to come from a change that allows homeowners to increase the number of dwellings on what is currently an R1-lot (most of CBL is R-1) to three dwellings. That’s a done deal; the three-dwelling rule is not going to change, and it probably shouldn’t.
The increase in density will occur in an uncoordinated one-at-a-time fashion as property owners decide individually when to add a dwelling or two. Private recreational space will disappear in the process—space that families currently use for building snowmen, jumping on trampolines, shooting hoops, swinging. playing hopscotch, barbecuing, gardening, putting up birdfeeders, swimming, throwing a frisbee for the dog, goofing around, and so on.
Meanwhile, the City’s Parks and Recreation Master Plan is pretty much “business as usual” with a not-particularly ambitious target of 2.0 ha of parkland per 1,000 people, down from the 2.8 ha it used to be—a target the City will miss–and no recognition that anything different is about to occur. Even before Bill 23 removed the requirement for developers to contribute money for parkland, our Outer Urban sector was slated to fall short of its parkland target by 34%.
All this to say that we should probably be thinking about the new zoning by-law and ways to mitigate the changes and, if we have views, we should be making them known.
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