Here’s How Your Home Value Will Be Destroyed
Ottawa’s new zoning changes will radically change the built form of our cities.
The maximum number of units that can be placed on a N3 lot 50×100 feet is four with some exceptions. That is most lots in the older residential parts of town.
Kitchissippi Councillor Jeff Leiper has put a very easy-to-use housing-unit calculator on his website which you can use by clicking here.
You can discover your zoning by clicking for a map on the City of Ottawa website. The best bet is to insert your address to get the zoning.
If you are a developer, you buy up a 50×100-foot lot in a neighbourhood such as Wellington Village and you can put up a four-unit low-rise condo or apartment. You can sell four homes for the cost of one.
Small developers and individuals will jump at the chance to do that. One Bulldog reader says there are loopholes that can increase that unit number on a lot.
Many century-old homes will be flattened and the beautiful nature of Ottawa’s old neighbourhoods will be destroyed. Not only that but homes that people saved a lifetime for will have their values cut by hundreds of thousands of dollars with stumpies built next door.
Oh yes, it’s not just old neighbourhoods. It’s the whole city.
All this in the cause of extremification. Bad enough Ottawa City Hall has destroyed transit in the city, purchased $1 billion of electric buses which (particularly given the news of capacity problems at Hydro Ottawa) look as though they will be charged by natural-gas generators, put another $500 million into the failed Lansdowne redevelopment in a terrible retail market, and is part of a massively over-budget and unnecessary new central library that’s really not downtown … we could go on … now the city, the developers best friend with their campaign funding and tax revenue tied to them, want to take on your neighbourhood and all the other neighbourhoods in the city.
If you want something screwed up, give it to the city. Now it wants, not just light rail or huge misguided developments, but the whole city and given the municipality’s record of incompetence and ethical bankruptcy, it will massively botch things up.
You could protest this and many will try, but the fix is in just like at Lansdowne and the Tewin lands. You’ll pay for it through your home value being crushed. Developer money runs city hall and has turned the inhabitants on Laurier Avenue into puppets.
If anyone thinks this re-zoning is about saving the environment, they are as naive as people who believe the Tewin lands are about indigenous reconciliation. It’s about money, with campaign-funding-compromised councillors and an incompetent, money-challenged, ethically bankrupt bureaucracy.
Don’t believe this evaluation?
Why can’t Ottawa City Hall fill its numerous vacant senior positions … particularly in planning.
Good people don’t want to come to a municipality that has failed and could destroy their careers. Think the provincial LRT inquiry.
They’re scared and well they should be.
Good people don’t want to come to Ottawa City Hall.
Ken Gray
Might be a nice place to live, unless your single family home isn’t next door.
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
Mortgage-free retirees looking forward to moving away from the city can count on the fact that housing prices in the rest of the country will continue to rise and should expect to take on a new mortgage in their golden years should they relocate, OR alternatively remain “trapped” in Ottawa. What a world, what a world.
Sisco:
Thank you for this.
Yes, it is a shame for people who have worked all their lives to have their privacy, investment and peace destroyed by that.
Many people are counting on that money for their retirement. But the ideologically inclined don’t see practical picture, just their ideology and campaign donations.
It’s very sad.
cheers
kgray
I just went back to look at the map for Wellington Village (which I hope I understand the boundaries of). The lowest density zoning I could find north of Byron is N3, with a bit of N2 south of Byron. The maximum number of units on a 50′ by 100′ lot in N3 is 12, and in N2 it is 8 on Jeff Leiper’s calculator. So between 8 and 12 units are allowed. Twelve units on a 50′ by 100′ lot won’t look a lot like what we call a house in that area these days. Pretty extreme stuff. If residents of Wellington Village want to live in the kind of neighbourhood they live in today, time to look at another city I’m thinking.
This is not locked in stone.
It is a DRAFT.
The 5 planners leading this are seeing how far they can take intensification because they fear the change will not be fast enough. Put up a few rooming houses in R1 neighbourhoods and soon enough people will leave and costs will go down.
You have GOT TO COMPLAIN ON ENGAGE OTTAWA and to you city councilor.
We all agreed to intensification because we don’t want to lose arable land. We did not agree to the destruction of neighbourhoods and the devaluing of taxpayers major assets.
Community Groups have gone through the painstaking research of finding approved site plans, There are enough units approved under the old Official Plan rules to meet the provinces 10 year targets.
Second, the City has shown no innovation for instance building apartments on top of ice rinks and community centers to pay for the centres’ operations through the rents and to increase affordable housing. And to tax developers who are not building on their vacant land.