Ottawa community associations have banded together, calling on the city to put an immediate halt to the development of off-campus student housing and to establish a student housing strategy.
The groups outlined these requests in a letter to the mayor. The proposal aims to address the ongoing trend of single-family homes being converted into multi-unit housing for students.
The Glebe Community Association (GCA) discussed the letter at their board meeting Jan. 28, deciding not to sign it.
“We weren’t particularly comfortable with the ban on student housing because it didn’t reflect our community,” GCA president Christine McAllister said. “Their experience around student housing is quite different from ours based on volumes and their geographic area. We don’t have the same troubling background.”
The Glebe is part of the Ottawa South area, where a temporary bylaw was issued in April 2013 to put a stop to these conversions. A large volume of development applications in the last year prompted the creation of the bylaw.
“In terms of the challenges we face on the developments in our neighbourhood, it was very helpful,” McAllister said of the temporary bylaw. “Like take a step back and look before we let the development continue. From our perspective, it was a good thing to do.”
Since then, the city has drafted a proposal, last updated Nov. 26, to amend the temporary bylaw.
The GCA board members have not yet examined it in full, according to McAllister. She said she thinks preliminary reception has been positive and the GCA board decided to instead write its own letter to the mayor encouraging the creation of a student housing strategy.
Capital Ward city councillor David Chernushenko said the proposal was made and issued after the city spent six to eight months consulting residents and developers about their views on home conversion.
“The draft report essentially is recommending that we get rid of that term conversion and that we continue to allow people to modify their homes in modesty,” Chernushenko said. “But the type of significant expansion that we are seeing would only be allowed under certain conditions.”
Chernushenko said now is the best time to make amendments to the policy.
“Now is our chance, before they become too common to revise the rules, so developers know what types of conversions, what the new rules are,” he said.
Chernushenko said developers can then choose whether or not to buy more properties, understanding that under the new rules, they wouldn’t make as much of a profit as before.
