intensification– blight or boon? community building via neo urbanism prepared for: dalhousie...

Intensification– Blight or Boon?Community Building via Neo Urbanism

Prepared for: Dalhousie Community AssociationBy: @ProfBruceApril 10, 2012

Professor Bruce Murray FirestoneB. Eng. (Civil), M. Eng.-Sci., Ph.D.

Founder Ottawa Senators, Ottawa Senators Foundation and Scotiabank Place Entrepreneurship Ambassador, Telfer School of Management, University of OttawaExecutive Director, Exploriem.org Novelist, Quantum EntityWriter, Entrepreneurs Handbook IIColumnist, Ottawa Business Journalist

•Follow him on Twitter at @ProfBruce •Read his blog at www.EQJournal.org•Current motto: “Making Each Day Count”

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Four key Ottawa areas: Rockcliffe Airbase/Lebreton Flats/Lansdowne Park/Scotiabank Place

Crucial pieces of urban property How to create superb urban design? What advice would you

offer NCC? RFP, right?

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

NCC should never have expropriated Lebreton Flats!

“My Dad was Alderman for Dalhousie Ward from 1948 to 1968. The ward included The Flats. I remember as a young boy going into corner stores to make sure my Dad’s election signs were not covered up by others during election campaigns,” Jim McCauley 

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Corner stores? In-home apartments and granny flats? Elders can stay in  community? Mixed use? Walkable place? Mixing together of folks

from differing socio economic strata?

Sounds like a Wonderful Life…

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Build close to the road? Front porches? Narrower roads? A vibrant public room? Streetcars? Work from home? Apartments above shops?

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Apartments above shops? No way! My grandfather came from Russia in 1909 Lived on Dalhousie with his wife and 3 little

girls 1 of them– my Mom! Lived upstairs Shop downstairs

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Tolerance for diversity? Problems solved at town hall meetings? Schools, government offices, post offices,

libraries, places of worship get best sites? Roads grid based? Every road two way? On-street parking allowed?

(Kanata school under power lines!)

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Density bonusing to encourage mixed use (read residential use) in downtown ‘commercial’ zones?

Vertical transition lines? Wow effect (window-on-world, where all

buildings open to street at grade)? THESE ARE SOME OF THE PRINCIPLES OF

NEO-URBANISM

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

What if we had an island connected to a downtown core?

Let’s RFP it and get ONE MEGA CORP to develop it for us, OK?

Easy for aGovernmentalOrg to do– limitedresponsibility/pre-qualify them

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

What if we walked the site and bounded it instead?

Broke it up into dozens/hundreds of parcels?

Applied principles of neo-urbanism?

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

We’d get: Vancouver Granville Island

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

We’d get: Ottawa Byward Market

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Instead of a new No-Place

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

A new no-place where small and medium sized developers cannot participate

A no-place where a Russian immigrant cannot live

A no-place where you can’t walk to a shop A no-place where you can’t work A no-place where if you don’t have a car,

you are a second class citizen A no-place where kids are disenfranchised

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

A no-place where the spaces in between buildings are dark and dangerous

A no-place with mirror glass at grade A no-place with nowhere to go and no

reason to stay The Village of the Damned… A BLANK WALL A BLANK WALL A BLANK WALL

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Ugly apartment building

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

First three storeys used for parking garage Podium facing street/another blank wall Quashes street life, denigrates area, lowers

public safety

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Basically throw away by developer in terms of economic value

Defies almost all principles of neo-urbanism and sound city building

What to do?

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Towns at grade Or retail at grade Anything with a door to and from the world

Start with a Flat Treeless Plain– Lebreton Flats!

Happily neo-urbanist principles/highest and best use test/come together to create better urban spaces AND increase property values!

Densification and Intensification

Densification => more of the same use at any one point in the urban fabric

Intensification => more mixed use at any one point in the urban fabric

Densification and Intensification

Sparks Street Mall circa 1980s NCC asks how to add life > 5 pm and on

weekends Answer: bring more people to live within 10

minute walk A la Manhattan It’s not exactly a state

secret, is it?

Densification and Intensification

Add a charity casino to unused/underused BOM heritage building?

Instead being renovated as ceremonial showcase for House of Commons use

Should do a lot to revitalize area/be a real hotspot, NOT

Densification and Intensification

Need to build a live/work/play community EVERYWHERE

Give developers density bonus for residential addition to office buildings

Require developers to use bonus! For hotel/apartments/condos… anything

with people living there Sounds like Manhattan to me!

Densification and Intensification

Start with NCC property! Add res component! NCC does financial analysis and rejects it

for their own properties! Invests $5.5 million in fancy street furniture

instead!

Densification and Intensification

We built better cities circa 1930s than we do today

When architects allowed urban planners to takeover urban planning…

Densification and Intensification

They were told where to put ingress/egress, what setbacks to use, how high they could build, what uses they could put their structures to, even materiality and design strictures

From people who know NOTHING about design

What we got was urban blight… places that are sh_t

Densification and Intensification

James Howard Kunstler says: BURN ALL YOUR ZONING CODES (Home from Nowhere)

Fear not densification or intensification More people living in your neighborhood

drives up demand for your property, all else being equal

More people working/playing in your neighborhood drives up demand for your property, all else being equal

All else being equal => absence of street crime and disorder

Densification and Intensification

Modern economy is about providing people with more options

Ottawa is WRONG TO OPPOSE city expansion Not everyone wants to live on Elgin Street

above a pub People who live in apartments above a store

not necessarily same people who live in townhomes or single family residences

Can densify and intensify suburbs too (granny flats/apartments above garage/work from home…)

Densification and Intensification

Horizontal expansion of a city drives up density at core

Otherwise New York would have same (horizontal) rent curve as Ottawa

If I am wrong! Use negative property taxes and SAZs to

compensate neighbours (Lily Chi)

Prescriptions

Finish Bus Transitway Ridiculous that Ottawa invested billions $$$

and never completed Transitway Forgot a whole section in west end (now

being expropriated) Get on a bus and NEVER mingle with a car

from city centre to Orleans/Kanata/Barrhaven

Prescriptions

Ottawa never completes anything How about light rail to Barrhaven? Ottawa spends $80+ million on South end

(planning/expropriation) for light rail and then… gets nothing but a lawsuit?

Which costs another $30+ million And doesn’t get us one day closer to east-

west light rail?

Prescriptions

Practice neo-urbanism Embrace Richard Florida’s diversity index–

in built form and socio-economically Build an artful community– both built form

and street life/bounded public room/theatre of the street

Instead of banning it

Prescriptions

Ottawa has three great rivers and one world heritage canal but you might never know it…

Prescriptions

If you were in charge of the NCC, you would?

a. I would build cafés and loft apartments along the banks of our great rivers.

b. I would build car-only highways (aka, ‘parkways’) next to the Rivers and cut off pedestrian access to our waterways.

Prescriptions

If you were an Ottawa planner in 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, you would?

a. I would rip up all the streetcar tracks that allow a ten-year old boy to go the films for 5 cents a ride and replace them with diesel buses at 25 cents a ride.

b. I would tear down beach houses at public beaches that provided folks with change rooms, meeting rooms, dance halls, and snack shops and replace them with … nothing.

Prescriptions

If you were an Ottawa planner in 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, you would?

a. I would tear out rail lines and transform the old Union Station into ... nothing.

b. I would tear down the grand old Capital Theatre and replace it with a non-descript Headquarters for Regional Government staff.

c. I would move the central railroad station to a suburb.

Prescriptions

If you were an Ottawa planner in 2010s, you would?

I would encourage densification by disallowing granny flats to be built in a person’s backyard by either outright banning them via zoning codes or by regulating them out of existence by making them temporary structures that have to removed after five years or charging a DC for ‘extra infrastructure’ even when none is required.

Prescriptions

If you were an Ottawa planner in 2010s, you would?

I would encourage densification by either outright banning duplexes and triplexes or by hitting them up for two or even three DCs even though they do not impose any additional, higher costs.

I would encourage densification by ensuring that apartment buildings have a much higher property tax rate than single-family homes.

Prescriptions

If you were an Ottawa planner in 2010s, you would?

I would ban organized street tree planting because they threatenroads and sewers eventhough that has beendemonstrated to beuntrue.

Prescriptions

Original West Terrace plan Could NOT explain mixed use or build-to

lines (as opposed to setbacks) to planners

Prescriptions

But things are getting (marginally) better Kanata West Concept plan:

Final Word

I have 5 kids 3 of them daughters Overheard Jessica, our youngest, saying

when she was a little girl: “When I’m growed up, I’m going move to Riverdale.”

“Where’s that?” Dad asks.

Final Word

It’s where Archie and Betty and Veronica and Jughead live!

Final Word

“The reason everyone likes Riverdale is because everything is in walkingdistance, the shopping mall, the grocery store, the restaurant(s), the maltshop, yada yada yada. Just thought you might need this bit of info,” Jessica      (Email message from Jessica, age 10, to her Dad, Sunday October 7th, 2001)

@ProfBruce