In Defence Of Jeff Leiper: POTTER
By Evan Potter
I certainly understand why Bulldog readers are upset at planning committee chairman Jeff Leiper’s quip.
It seems like a throwaway line directed at residents who are often characterized at NIMBYs.
I’m not qualified to speak to Leiper’s record as a councillor over the last 10 years, but I can provide some context, having observed planning committee over the last year.
\There is a palpable sense, as expressed by Leiper and his fellow councillors, that under Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Bill 23 and its ‘as-of-right zoning,’ municipal planning committees across Ontario are pretty well neutered. They have much less power because, as Leiper reminds committee members all the time, when their No decisions on applications get appealed to the Ontario Land Tribunal, they know in advance that they will likely lose.
A person delegating to the committee on Sept. 11 suggested that the committee should consider rejecting applications on the basis of principle even though councillors know this decision will be overturned on appeal. In this light, Leiper rightly, considers such action to be a waste of public resources. I’m not going to blame Leiper for the profound implications on land use planning of Bill 23.
Now let me say a few words about ‘as-of-right’ four units in the ‘burbs that Leiper to which was referring. Leiper actually knows that there will not be a proliferation of intensification in single-family traditional neighbourhoods. The ‘nightmare’ of new fourplex student bunkers starting to appear next to bungalows isn’t going to happen for the simple reason that the math doesn’t make sense.
Converting existing bungalows into fourplexes is a losing proposition financially as is knocking down bungalows and building new fourplexes in their places. The truth is that we can’t scale intensification in Ottawa by converting bungalows into fourplexes. The intensification that we need is large residential building projects at transit hubs.
The infill in the burbs – replacing single family bungalows with fourplexes – will continue to be organic and one-off. No developer is going to show up to a street in Nepean and pay $1.5M per lot to assemble 20 lots in order to charge $2100/month rent on 80 two-bedroom units. You can make more money putting your money in GICs. That is to say, there won’t be much intensification in Nepean.
Developers either subdivide a large suburban lot and build two luxury houses on it or they look for cheap farmland, paid-for infrastructure, and the potential of thousands of units. Therefore, characters of these neighbourhoods won’t suddenly change because of an inflow of transient renters because there won’t be the multifamily units to accommodate them.
So, the subtext of Leiper’s quip that Bulldog readers found offensive is that Ontario’s Bill 23 is a direct shot at NIMBYs in the suburbs. I guess he was trying to be droll. The irony of all this is that those NIMBYs don’t actually have to worry. There won’t be immediate major changes in their suburban neighbourhoods as a result of Bill 23. Leiper knows that, too.
Evan Potter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include public diplomacy, government communications, and strategic communication in a military context.
For You:
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What’s In Leiper’s Heart Is Not Pretty
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We had 2 Senior planners at our community meeting last week and I asked the 4plex question directly. They said that on average they anticipate 14% of current single family homes to be 4plexes by 2040, so in 16 years. So roughly 1 of every 6 or 7 homes will be a 4 Plex. The hiccup for developers is that to make up for the loss of permeable land, they have to have cisterns which could be in the attic of the house or outside, probably buried I guess, I know nothing about cisterns. If I understand this correctly and I was at the meeting where this was discussed but I have no proof, when Marianne Wilkinson was councillor, 1/3 of the significant amount of city land around Kanata centrum was zoned for affordable housing. It was part of her legacy to keep Kanata 1/3 affordable in accordance with the initial design of Bill Teron. After she retired, the city sold all that land to developers and it got rezoned into, well, unaffordable housing. I don’t have a lot of time for any planning committee members, or the new councillor back then, who allowed that to happen and find that the new cry for affordable housing is pretty hypocritical. I don’t know if Lieper was on the committee at that time.
There are a lot of great points raised in this. Bill 23 increased housing units allowed on a site, but the federal requirement to allow four units on a lot to qualify for Housing Accelerator Fund money went a step further. That commitment to four units will become even higher in the new zoning by-law proposed locally here in Ottawa. So the question becomes whether the zoning by-law allowing perhaps 20 or more dwelling units on existing lots in evolving areas will be financially attractive to developers. In many ways the zoning by-law proposes allowing developments as of right which currently go through the zoning by-law variance application process (which tends to be approved at OLT today). If the frustration at planning committee that their recommendations would be overturned at OLT affects judgement in the approval of the new zoning by-law, could we possibly allow development as of right that we might otherwise reject in a variance application today? A downfall in this might be that where the OLT decision making might change with a new provincial government, if we permit transformational change to zoning as of right, we may be stuck with these developments for much longer.
John,
I think that’s part of the Ford government’s plan. They are well aware that the policies they’re bringing in can be overturned by a subsequent provincial government but that, if they can get their vision entrenched within local planning and zoning, their changes will be much harder, if not impossible, to dislodge. Plus, for all the years their vision is maintained by and through others, they will change the face of our communities.
Once four or six or eight+ units are built on a lot, they will remain for decades and, even when they ultimately come to the end of their life cycle, it’s unlikely they will be replaced by anything smaller. So the Ford blight will be perpetuated across our neighbourhoods ad infinitum but his fingers won’t be visible. Instead, it will be brought to you by local planning bylaws. Ford and his minions know exactly what they’re doing.