How to Revitalize Downtown Ottawa
Our Mayor's Unwillingness to Challenge the Status Quo is Crippling Efforts to Rebuild the Core
Since the pandemic, the power brokers in this city have been hard at work trying to get downtown back on its feet.
First, there was the Downtown Revitalization Task Force report, Envisioning a Great Downtown, in January.
Then, there was the Ottawa Board of Trade’s action agenda, A Living Capital, that came out last week.
Right analysis, wrong conclusions
Those reports correctly point to the reasons for downtown stagnation. Not enough people living, working and visiting downtown.
Catherine McKenney and I have previously written about this. City centres thrive when people bring them to life.
But where these reports go wrong is in what to do about it.
And specifically, what recommendations the reports choose to ignore because the authors are trying to accommodate the Mayor’s inability or unwillingness to challenge the status quo.
Mark Sutcliffe probably doesn’t realize it but his biases are holding back the revitalization of downtown Ottawa. And the business establishment in this city is complicit, with their eagerness to tell the mayor whatever he wants to hear.
Consider a few examples.
Balanced approach to transportation
Sutcliffe focused his mayoral campaign on getting the basics right and providing a balanced approach to transportation.
Balance for Sutcliffe has been about protecting the status quo. Every major transportation announcement — from the Greenbank Road alignment to the Barnsdale 416 exit to reopening Wellington Street — has been about prioritizing cars over everything else.
Sutcliffe was opposed to keeping Wellington Street pedestrianized on the grounds that a closed road might inconvenience traffic. This is short-sighted thinking.
As Senator Cardozo and I have written, a pedestrianized Wellington could be a major new tourist attraction for downtown Ottawa, funded entirely with federal money.
What was remarkable in the two reports was that neither even mentioned Wellington Street as one opportunity for downtown revitalization. A disappointing, if predictable, example of the Ottawa establishment trying to curry favour with the Mayor.
Unwillingness to work with the NCC
The National Capital Commission is the largest landowner in the region. Most of what people love about this city is thanks to the NCC. The Skateway, the parkways, the River House, the nearby Gatineau Park, …
The NCC has money to fix things. They also have a track record of creating excellent public spaces.
What the NCC does not have is a lot of political cover to move things forward when either the city of Ottawa or Gatineau does not agree.
Another opportunity for attracting more downtown visitors would be to create a magnificent national urban park along the banks of the Rideau Canal. One local architect sketched out what this might look like.
Since then, the idea of a Queen Elizabeth National Urban Park has taken on a life of its own, to the point where it even has its own t-shirt.
Sutcliffe has famously fought a war of words with the NCC over the Queen Elizabeth Driveway. His primary motivation, it would appear, is to do the bidding of the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group — who seem to believe that expanding the QED is the answer to the failing Lansdowne project.
A Queen Elizabeth National Urban Park could be as transformative for Ottawa in the 2020s as the creation of the Rideau Canal Skateway was in the 1970s. But this mayor is more concerned with managing the peak parking at Lansdowne that occurs a few days a month.
Again, it is remarkable that neither report talked about how we could use the lands around the Canal — the jewel in Ottawa’s crown — as a strategy for revitalizing downtown.
(Interesting historical side note. Back when the NCC was pushing to create the Skateway, they approached the City of Ottawa to share in snow clearing. The City refused. Luckily, the NCC went ahead on its own. Apparently, the preference at City Council around this time was to pave the Canal and turn it into a freeway. Is today’s City Council, given a similar opportunity for greatness, not adopting the same small mindedness as their predecessors?)
A place for people, or a police station
The OTTAWA sign on York Street in the ByWard Market has become a favourite spot for taking photos. Not surprising in the Instagram age.
Sutcliffe’s plan for restoring the ByWard Market is to spend millions on a new police station. A police station in the nearby Rideau Centre shopping mall — not even in the Market itself.
I’d suggest a better place to start would be to remove parking from York Street and create a people-focused plaza. Bring the space to live with exhibits, stages, food trucks and other attractions.
But Sutcliffe is too beholden to the status quo car culture to consider removing any parking spots. Again, neither report had the courage to point out the experience of other cities is that street parking is more of an impediment than a solution to downtown revitalization.
Better ways to revitalize downtown Ottawa
Wellington, QED and the ByWard Market are three examples of how the Mayor’s biases are preventing progress.
To revitalize downtown Ottawa, here are four approaches I’d suggest.
To get more visitors downtown, work pro-actively with the NCC to transform Wellington Street and the Queen Elizabeth Driveway into world-class attractions. The City should only agree to proceed when the federal government is prepared to put $20 million or more into revitalizing those spaces in order to create beautiful and engaging public spaces.
To get more people living downtown, copy Calgary in funding a $50-100 million office-to-residential incentive program. Calgary has already created over 700 new downtown homes through their conversion program. Ottawa could pay for that fund by cancelling the unnecessary $68 million widening of 3.5km of the Airport Parkway between Brookfield Ave and Hunt Club Road.
To get more people working downtown, start by bringing back the artists, musicians and chefs. Create a municipal incentive program to help landlords lease out underused space to creative types, as Denver did in the 1990s. Make working downtown cool again.
To pay for downtown revitalization, put your money where your mouth is. If you are going to ask “all levels of government” to pony up a $500 million fund, as suggested in the Living Capital report, then show you are serious by putting municipal dollars on the table first. To pay for it, take a long hard look at the list below of 14 largely-unnecessary road widening projects on which we will spend close to $1 billion in total. Ask if the money from any one of those road projects could be used to kickstart a downtown revitalization fund.
There are practical solutions for downtown revitalization. But they require leadership that is prepared to challenge the status quo.
We don’t have that leadership in our Mayor. And we’re not seeing it in our local business establishment.
Can downtown revitalization happen if the people around the Mayor lack the courage to speak truth to power?
How do we get these kinds of messages out to the public at large, to councillors and potential councillor and mayoral candidates so this kind of smart change happens?
Overall, I'm very supportive of the initiatives you outline. But, it remains that Ottawa is governed as a suburban city, not an urban one. Several consequences that are sticky. One, for example, is planning decisions biased to retaining existing suburbs at the expense of downtown neighbourhoods. 'Revitalization' of downtown Ottawa = zombie streets such as Rideau Street. That is, no soft city development, only towers with poor street life.
The brilliance of Ottawa is that a very small parcel of central Ottawa's tax base supports the rest of the expansive city, with very little investment allowing Centretown, the Market or Sandy Hill to aspire to being an already dense livable neighbourhood - rather than its evolution to stacked units of people who don't know each other and lacking 15-minute services (e.g loss of hardware stores) Consider a comparison of services in Lowertown versus say, Orleans. If you spread the density and tax base deeper into the suburbs, you may actually end up with a proper healthy urban inner city, but much of the existing tax base feeds the broad stroads of our suburbs.
Most flawed cities are pyramids (central towers, diminishing out to larger and larger parcels of private property). Garden cities, with proper public transit, would relieve the pressure and just maybe create truly urban streets (activated with people, reduced commuter roads, revived high streets etc.)
Until someone actually breaks up the majority voting of suburban and rural councilors on urban decisions, then that long-ago strategy by the Harris government will continue to perpetuate dead inner cities. Again, walk down Rideau Street now....A tower street dependent on cars travelling out to the suburbs for services.