Pedestrian Oriented Development in Downtown Ottawa

By Barbara Carss

The first phase of redevelopment is under way on a former industrial site near the Ottawa train station. A 133,000-square-foot Wal-Mart, slated to open in summer 2006, is the initial project in an envisioned commercial node about four kilometers from the downtown core. The 95-acre parcel is earmarked for up to 1.1 million square feet of office space and 550,000 square feet of retail.

The site previously accommodated rail beds and services associated with freight yards that have been relocated farther outside the developed area of the city. Developers and local officials now see new potential to exploit strategic links to public transit and serve a nearby consumer base and labor force.

“It has a number of very interesting, very positive characteristics,” says Marty Koshman, President of Ottawa Train Yards Inc. “Within five kilometers, there are 300,000 people. It’s sort of on the edge of downtown in an area very under-serviced from a retail point of view.”

The site has convenient connections to two highway interchanges and two stations on Ottawa’s Transitway, the dedicated bus roadway that stretches across the city. This includes the Hurdman station, which is a major hub with an interconnection of the east/west and north/south routes of the transit system. There is also direct access to the Via Rail station and the Windsor/Quebec City corridor passenger rail service.

“It was seen as a good location for a commercial node that would offer significant employment potential within close proximity to the downtown,” concurs John Smit, Program Manager, Development Review, with Ottawa’s Planning and Growth Management Department.

Nevertheless, redevelopment plans have taken some time to unfold. Applications for an Official Plan amendment and rezoning to allow for new land uses were first submitted in the late 1990s. The developer also had to clean up some contamination — primarily hydrocarbons from earlier fueling, maintenance and trucking activities on the site — before any new development could occur.

“We’ve been on our own in this project,” Koshman observes. “There have actually been zero incentives and there have been a lot of detractors. It has been slow in coming.”

The city is currently devising a community improvement plan (CIP) to deal with contaminated, abandoned and/or under-performing lands known as brownfields, which will provide investors and developers with incentives for rehabilitating such properties, but the Ottawa Train Yards project is unlikely to receive any retroactive relief.

“As far as this site is concerned, it is not one of the more contaminated sites,” Smit says. “In Ottawa, it’s clear that we’re not an industrial based economy. We do have a lot of industrial land, but we don’t have a lot of heavy industry. This site was never really fully utilized even under the industrial zoning. Most of the property really was sort of a truck depot.”

The new plan calls for a 30-acre office campus and adjoining retail power center, linked to each other and to the surrounding streets by walking paths and green space. The design criteria are aimed at creating a denser, more urban and pedestrian oriented context for large format retail than the typical suburban setting.

“Clearly there is a market for these types of development to be downtown as well, but we don’t want to carry forward the suburban characteristics,“ Smit notes. “With the parking lots, for example, we directed that they be broken up into segments so we don’t have a large sea of asphalt.”

Three multi-tenant retail buildings, totalling approximately 240,000 square feet, are the next anticipated projects. No office buildings are in development yet.
Other sites in the vicinity have also been targeted for redevelopment and intensification, including a large tract the National Capital Commission owns near the Hurdman Transitway station, and a site the Ontario government owns on nearby Tremblay Road.

Areas similar to the Ottawa Train Yards site — along arterial roads, at the edges of established communities and easily accessible by public transit — are considered key to the city’s growth management strategy. “That’s really where you find the opportunities to bring about the city’s intensification objectives,” Smit says.

Koshman says the pending brownfields CIP should also help ease future redevelopment projects. “Would we do another one? Definitely yes,” he says. “I think people have more understanding of the problem and, with further new technologies coming into use, have overcome their fear of brownfields.” BFN

Barbara Carss is editor-in-chief at MediaEdge Communications in Toronto. This article is reprinted with permission from the Daily Commercial News.