My 6-Month Review of our Community

I’ve officially been a sitting board member of the Convent Glen Orleans Wood Community Association for 6 months now. I’ve also lived in the community for 5+ years and have family with deep roots here. As I was sitting down to put together the April edition of the newsletter, I thought to myself: “What have I learned about this community and the people in it that I can share to commemorate half a year into this whole thing?”

After thinking about it for a bit, I came up with 5 things I’ve learned about our neighbourhood. I should note that in the last couple of years, even before I joined the CA, I have been doing a lot of research, reading books, and learning a lot about urban design principles, along with municipal zoning and finances. I am by no means an expert, but it has been so interesting, and I have learned a ton.

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At some point, I’d like to write something longer about each of these, but for now I’ll try to keep it relatively short. I’d love it if you’d join our Community Forum (hosted on the chat platform Discord) and give your two cents.

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1. Low density neighbourhoods with mostly or only single-family housing are dramatically under-taxed

Usually, when you hear someone talk about property taxes, they are complaining about rates being too high and annual increases being too large. I think it would really help our city’s finances if more people had the opposite perspective. Property taxes for suburbs and urban single-family homes are exceptionally low for the amount of space used in these communities, and I think the city as a whole would massively benefit by taxing these properties proportionally to housing density.

Personally, I fall under the ‘Want Stable Services’ and ‘Want Low Taxes’ (who actually *wants* high taxes), and so for my own personal view ‘More Density’ is the answer.

2. Our city budgets don’t balance because car-dependent urban sprawl is really expensive

Part of the cause of #1 is that sprawled out, sparse (low density) development sort of necessarily requires mass transportation infrastructure. This is because at these housing densities, it’s nearly impossible to put lots of common services and amenities close enough to where people live that they can realistically walk there. Ottawa (and most North American cities) decided decades ago that the main mass transportation infrastructure we were going to focus on was personal cars, trucks, and more recently, SUVs.

This is pretty much the most expensive and space-taking way to build a transportation network, because cars are massive (at human scale), and the infrastructure required to make car trips flexible and remotely time-efficient has required absolutely everything else to get completely out of the way. Cars are a superpower in very specific situations, but more cars and more space for cars is not going to solve problems with our transportation network, it is going to make them worse.

3. Almost all of our car infrastructure is extremely over-built, while almost all of our other transportation infrastructure is dramatically under-built

I wasn’t around in the 80s, when the suburb of Convent Glen was built, but you can tell that the builders thought two main things about outdoor space. They clearly saw that green space was important, but it’s just as clear that they were expecting people to drive literally everywhere they actually wanted to go (and that everything you’d want to get to would only be reachable in a car).

When Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard was built, as a 4-lane road, it was designed to accommodate future increases in car traffic decades from then. This is despite the fact that the community cannot possibly grow larger, being surrounded in the north by the greenbelt, the river, and highway 174. The (necessary) gradual growth in the size and density of our community (see #1) cannot comfortably make any more room for cars (streets or parking), and so the transportation network must adapt to include more accommodations for other modes of transportation (see #4 and #5).

4. Small change can make a big impact on transportation choices, and your emails to the city matter

Over the last two years, I have been bugging the city persistently on winter maintenance for the path network that exists inside the Voyageur and Vineyard loops to better accommodate winter transportation that isn’t car dependent. This past winter, city crews fully rose to meet the challenge I had laid out for them, keeping on top of this maintenance on the main routes I was suggesting through every snowfall. I do continue to make the case that more of the network needs to be renewed to a modern paving standard (one capable of bearing the weight and blade of a mini-plow) so that the entire path network can be fully maintained through the winter, but it was a great start.

Maintaining our non-road transportation infrastructure in the winter is just as important for accessibility as maintaining our roads themselves. In heavy enough snow, both become impassable and potentially dangerous until they are cleared by plow. By making it 10% easier for kids to walk or ride a scooter or bike to school, real actual people are going to choose to make the walk rather than getting in their cars, and making it 10% harder to move around the community outside a car (say, by not clearing 5-10 cm of snow from the path network), we are prompting more people to make the choice to drive even short distances. These everyday choices matter, and small changes to the built environment do affect choices.

As someone who has walked their kids to school every single day for the last 3 years, since they began school, I see these choices play out daily.

5. Our shared sense of community spirit is basically non-existent, and in our neighbourhoods, community places are distributed very unevenly

I live in Convent Glen, north of the 174. Looking at a map, it’s extremely clear this place is basically completely devoid of any accessible, indoor public space at all. We have schools, and a minuscule amount of retail space that hasn’t grown or changed much in decades, save for a derelict gas station that is now (thankfully) a Habitat for Humanity development.

This lack of shared and accessible *indoor* public spaces within easy walking distance means anywhere we go, we are more likely to see random people (strangers) who live further from us than our own neighbours. If we never or rarely get the chance to spend time with our neighbours without going out of our way to arrange it, it will be very difficult to come to a shared understanding of what we want and need as a community.

By the way, anything that requires crossing the highway is a non-starter in this argument. The shortest walk from a dwelling (that same Habitat for Humanity development) to another amenity across the highway is 700m or a 10-minute walk according to Google Maps. Any other dwellings are at least another 100 metres further walk, and that just gets you to the nearest entrance of the Bob Macquarrie Rec Centre.

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What Next?

Do I have easy solutions for all these issues I’ve identified (some of which you may even recognize or agree with!)? Nope. We’ve built some of these decisions into our neighbourhoods in literal stone. In other cases, the decisions that have led to these outcomes are the product of human choices, and in many cases those choices are going to take some foundational shifts to change. Change is difficult, especially when it can be hard to see symptoms of the problem unless you know where to look. But I do think acknowledging a need for change is a good first step, and committing to actually changing this is an even more crucial second step.

The board of the Community Association can’t address these issues alone, there are only 8 of us. The more people in the community who understand the ways in which our built infrastructure is failing us, the more we can do together to address it. The final point here, #5, is probably the most important, because without a solid shared understanding of what can be improved and why, there’s almost no hope of anything else being accomplished. We will need to organize and work together to create more places in our community, and it won’t be easy.

We have lots of ways to get involved in our work and make this a reality. Please check out the Community Association Starter Kit to see where you can pitch in and breathe some much-needed wind into the sails of our community.