Notice that it has a real slate roof, there are few houses or buildings left in our neighborhood with slate roofs. In this case, it probably was to provide additional fire proofing from the sparks that flew out of the many steam engines in the area.

David Jeanes tells me this may have been the home of Ottawa Stair Works. Probably built right after the Great Fire in 1902, the building then faced Somerset Street which was not yet elevated up on the viaduct as it is now. The area behind it, now the City Centre parking lot, was first the D Kemp Edwards Lumber Yards, later the Argue Coal Company yards. In this 1912 fire insurance map the building was located, but not shown on the map, immediately right of the blue building labelled “planing mill”.

Somerset Street runs across the bottom of the pic; the blue building is approximately where the south end of the City Centre warehouses now is. The building is shown in its correct location in earlier maps, just not the 1912 version.

It was later used by fashion apparel establishments, and for hobby, toy, and picture framing businesses. It now appears to be empty.

All this is a long way around to saying that the community association has suggested to the Bayview CDP planning team that this old structure should be kept or relocated on the site when the area is redeveloped for the three planned condo towers and commercial development. It would make a pleasant contrast to the modern towers that will surround it, and could function as a coffee shop, bike dealer (it would be right on the new O-train north-south bike route being constructed this summer, as it could be just north of the new Somerset bike underpass).

What do you think? Should it be saved and incorporated into the new project?

The result has been a spate of “carriageways” or porticos.

Sometimes these are on large buildings, such as Claridge has built on the Flats

and is proposing for the project at Richmond/Kirkwood. Recall too that Ashcroft is proposing two pedestrian porticos from Richmond into the Our Lady of the Condos site.

Here is a simple driveway entering a tiny courtyard with six or so garages. The “flatiron” rooms above it are interesting. It is on Gladstone:

And there is another development coming, this time on Booth, designed by Hobin, where the carriageway entrance goes into a mews with another row of townhouses in the back. Simple, neat, attractive. And the laneway is only one storey high.

But just a block away, on Rochester, the developer there insists that he could not ever possibly build carriageway entrances to his project because… Well, because they would have to be at least 16′ high, be fire-proof, be big enough for fire trucks, be very wide, and all sorts of other too-expensive provisions. Thus the site layout could not be improved as the community association suggested. I wonder why Fotenn chose to take this “can’t be done” route when it is becoming so popular for others?

Sometimes small minds are found in the largest developer agencies; and the neighborhood misses out.

And here is the grand-daddy arch of them all, Rowe’s Wharf in Boston. It is big enough to span a whole street. Speaking of which, when will we see something like that in Ottawa?

NCC skateway street sign as seen from the Corktown Bridge

The City ascribes geographic omniscience as a characteristic of cyclists. How else could one explain the total lack of street signs or directional signs along the City’s multi-user paths (usually called “bike paths”).

In contrast, vehicular motorists are considered by the City to be geographical ignoramuses. How else could one explain the provision of street signs on every corner of every street, no matter how minor the street or how few places (if any) there are on the street?

Sarcasm aside, there should be street signs along pedestrian and cycling paths. They should be installed using similar criteria to regular street signs, ie at every corner.

Some destination signs would be useful too. These California format signs are pretty nifty:

As is usual in Ottawa, we are “considering” the issue of pedestrian and cyclist wayfinding. This requires some serious study. Should routes be numbered or named? How many signs, how big, and where to install them. Will they obstruct motorist sight lines? Who will pay for them as bike paths are not city roads?

I fear this will take us into the land of the parking-meter-to-bike-posts fiasco, where thousands of parking meter posts were removed instead of being converted to bike posts because we set up criteria so detailed that it is difficult to find spots to put bike posts.

This is a familiar problem when dealing with traffic issues. Existing conditions, even if rebuilt, are grandfathered and don’t have to be changed. Any changes wanted by the community have to pass the most stringent new standards designed for unconstrained suburban environments. That’s why the engineers always win.

But in Ottawa we are blessed with the NCC. They installed cyclist wayfinding signs on their paths several years ago, and have been improving them. And now they have installed them on the canal, for ice skaters. Yup, motorists can know where they are, skaters can know where they are, but cyclists on city streets …

It’s not always that way. It’s just that good projects that are welcome in the neighborhood don’t get good press.

So here’s a good news story.

On Booth Street there is a blight that has cursed residents for years, Cousin Eddy’s Garage and Uncle Chado’s body shop. The city trees in front of the garages mysteriously died so we could all admire their ugliness and garbage-strewn grounds.

But redevelopment is in the winds. Barry Hobin is carrying the file, and for once there is no worry about gross overdevelopment. No highrise in the middle of a low-rise neighborhood. No walls of windows four feet from the lot lines. Nothing weird at all. Just 20 townhouses, affordably priced, nicely situated on the street and a mews.

Here’s the aerial shot:

St Anthony school and Church are off to the top right, split by Gladstone Avenue. Booth Street runs right-left through the shot, with the new townhouses superimposed mid-block.

Here’s the view from the front:

Immediately noticeable is that is not a bird’s-eye view. Hobin doesn’t assume we are all flying helicopters. It’s a genuine sidewalk-level view. And here’s the view from across the street, although I think the townhouses are drawn a bit too big:

It’s a bit hard to see at first glance, but there’s a portico driveway through the ground floor at the centre, beyond the near side thick wooden pole that protects pedestrians from marauding cars. The row of houses quickly closes up above the discrete driveway. Note once again that the architect is happy to show what his project looks like from the positions we will normally see it, ground level.

Here is the site plan:

And while celebrating this well-done infill project, it is worth noting his Planning Rationale submission (available at www.ottawa.ca/devapps). Most other rationales are thick documents that parse through relevant planning and zoning documents with a fine tooth comb, selecting out of context quotes to justify whatever new, larger, more wonderful project they are promoting. But this time, a simple two pager, written by the architect, no fancy planning firm required. It’s almost the good ole’ days.

He’s had a book out for a number of years: New Urbanism which may predate his new focus on the larger scale. 

His topic last night was city finance. Whilst working for Sarasota in Florida, a city hard hit by falling property values, abandoned properties, and plummeting tax revenue, he and his colleagues did a study on how much the County-level of government made from various types of urban development. (The County in this case is a larger geographical area that would be akin to our former regional government two-tier model).

First they looked at house types, eg the small ’40′s to 60′s bungalow, larger suburban singles, and towns/stacked towns/walk-ups. They then looked the tax revenue per acre for a Walmart-type big box store on a large lot; and various shopping malls. Finally, they looked at some downtown-ish mixed use buildings in the 7 to 17 storey range.

The urban mixed use developments generated a wildly disproportionately large share of taxes. In terms of payback, it takes a new suburban area about 43 years to pay back, in taxes, the costs of servicing the development (when new). It took the mixed use development only three years.

O-la-la, that’s a huge difference. Proof that pay-as-you-go Nepean et al were really Mayor Bernie Madoff Ponzi schemes? Not so fast.

It was very tempting to draw conclusions from his talk about the desirability of fostering mixed use urban developments as a better payoff financially for the government. And that is what he was definitely encouraging us to conclude.

But I found myself very mistrustful of his numbers. There was a distressing lack of detail. For a guy going around speaking to councils, planning teams, urban enthusiasts, planning students (a bus load of Queen’s U planners were there) I expected a bit more than generalities. Detail. Not hundreds of pages of detail, but enough supporting detail to be confident he was talking about relevant things.

Like, what does Sarasota provide those new developments? In Ottawa, local development roads are charged back to the developers; do they do this in Sarasota or does the County provide those roads? Without knowing something about the County INPUTS to the development, it is risky to generalize conclusions about the payback period that was such a big feature of his spiel. And he was totally silent on the inputs (costs) side.

I also found myself wondering about measurement. It’s easy to compute tax revenue per acre; not unexpectedly it will show low density uses generate less revenue than high density uses.* When calculating the big box mall site, did the acreage include the surrounding roads necessary to service it? Did the six-houses-per-acre suburb include or exclude local roads (which are about 35% of the area)? And did those two big mixed use projects in the downtown include only their block, measured inside the sidewalk perimeter, or did it include some of those space-gobbling freeways that service the high density downtown? All those things were skipped over, so I would like to have had just a few words about methodology.

Speaking of methodology, I wondered about a few other things. Was it the high density mixed use itself that generated the revenue, or was it because it was located downtown?

Would a suburban mixed use development have had a three-year payback?

And it is always very dangerous to extrapolate generalities from a small sample size And Mr Katz’s sample size was small. Very small. Two buildings. In one town. Both of which consisted of condos selling in the million dollar range. Ouch. The suburban developments on the other hand were not identified as to their selling value. Maybe, just maybe, the high tax revenue came from the value of the housing units themselves? In which case, let’s rule out the poor (something municipalities used to be good at; Nepean and other suburbs, when indie, used to have numerous ways of doing this, like minimum lot sizes, minimum house sizes, requirements for brick frontages, etc).

Now the focus of his talk was on municipal finance per se. I outlined some of my misgivings on generalizing from his sample size, possible confusion by property location, and value of the house units. But there were some other concealed messages. It’s all very well for a municipality to rah-rah mixed use buildings in the downtown, but these case study ones  were affordable only to households earning $350,000 a year and up. Those stick built bungalows and towns that didn’t generate so much revenue were sellable to households with incomes of $30,000 and up. Hmm. Back to the 50′s and exclusionary planning…

And I haven’t covered things like builder oligopoly, because larger buildings (such as those mixed use downtown high rises) are buildable primarily by larger builders, and new builders start with the small projects. Restrict those, and you’ve landed in the smart growth=unaffordability trap by virtue of a highly constrained market.

Despite these quibbles, Mr Katz’s very worthwhile message to municipalities was to know what your land uses generate in tax revenue, and what the payback period for each type is. You’d better know your costs too, but he didn’t cover that.

As for Sarasota, I wonder if it will change its ways, and become a downtown of high rise mixed use buildings of very expensive condos, with a narrow surround of low rises interspersed with mega-malls (these are profitable for the municipality), and no industry because industrial parks don’t pay back fast enough. Would I want to live there? Is Bean Counting the new Urban planning model?  You read it here first.

In the meantime, I’m hoping that some bright beanie at City Hall finance dept is calculating right now the real return from different types of municipal growth.

*Back in my days at Transport Canada I had long running battles with guys about transportation safety and efficiency. Airlines love to use safety per passenger mile; not coincidentially, that one measure is the one that most naturally favours airlines. And they excluded short haul flights, because those had more take off and landings per trip, which are the dangerous parts. Include those and their stats go into the dumper. Auto safety would be much more attractive if we excluded short trips, since most accidents occur with 5 miles of home. You get the idea. Since then, I always ask myself why a particular unit of measurement was chosen for a comparison. Is it fixed?

Her list is already started, and includes these obvious things:

Las Vegas - the new Starchitect hotel megaplex near the Bellagio, includes the Ghery building that focuses the sun’s rays onto a hot spot at the pool. She’s been to Vegas before, and will revisit old favorites like the Bellagio and ride the Deuce double decker transit. Did the “new” monorail ever open?

Sedona – the church high on the hillside sponsored by Barry Goldwater

Prescott - for the old Victorian neighborhoods

Phoenix - ride the LRT; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West; new downtown waterfront (?) project.

She’s starting to look things up on the ‘net, so don’t go to any special effort. You are not travel agents. Really, it’s just an exercise in finding out what fellow readers know of that would be nifty and interesting. Let ‘er rip. 

PS: having travelled before, she has already been the Canyon, Meteorite Hole, Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, etc. Think URBAN.

So now we have to

• pay to replace ageing pipes
• pay to “catch up” for the skipped work

and this will cost us big time. But, of course, it’s not a higher tax increase, no sir-ee it’s just user-pay, etc etc. Some people even have the gall to say it’s better than privatization, just look at the fast increases in cities that privatized … but maybe cities privatized because they were behind in infrastructure replacement and they outsourced it for a private firm to do the dirty work. And bonus, you can’t sue the City for a broken pipe, but you can sue a private firm for negligence or breach of promise.

There are a couple of wrinkles I haven’t seen addressed in the main stream media. One, is that a huge portion of the water bill is an “overhead” charge that we pay to the City. Sorta like profits, but guaranteed. Should the overhead cost go up in lockstep with the water charges?

The second is the future trend. It’s not just the 1900 pipes that are beyond their best-before date; there’s lots of suburban infrastructure that is ageing rapidly too. And those suburbs that boasted of being pay-as-you-go debt free, we now realize were just municipal Ponzi schemes collecting upfront development fees for grand visible projects like sportsplexes while stiffing other governments for the big expenditures (schools, major sewers and water pipes, major roads) or depending on developers to provide the local essentials, like streets and water pipes. And some of these municipalities neglected to keep any sort of plans or records of what pipes are where, their sizes, or conditions. Buried and outa’sight, outa’mind. We’ve been paying — and paying —  since amalgamation to find and map those pipes and other infrastructure.

So I expect the cost for pipe replacement to soar over the next decades as the suburban pipes need replacement. And and there are a LOT of pipe miles in those endless crescents of six-houses-per-acre 1950′s, 60′s, and 70′s neighborhoods. I suspect that those low density developments cannot possibly generate enough tax revenue to replace their pipes and roads. Bernie Madoff would be proud, and should have been (dis)Honorary Mayor of some of our suburban municipalities. This of course means every one else’s water bill will be jacked up.

Now condo boards used to follow the fine example of our municipal parents. They enjoyed their new buildings, wore down the parking lots, elevators, water and heating systems, roofs, and exterior walls, while keeping condo fees low. Seeing the coming of increased fees as replacement times loomed on the horizon, they fled or died of old age, leaving new owners to face the bills. Some of these special levies are huge and a real hardship to residents. The Province stepped in some years ago to mandate proper reserves to replace wearing out infrastructure, so gradually things will get back to an even keel. But for all those who tut tut about high condo fees, well those people are pre-funding their future major repairs while most homeowners, like the City, are not. 

I think its time to mandate the same replacement plan for municipalities. And instead of levying the charge city-wide, I’d like to see it levied on a neighborhood basis, so that low-density neighborhoods (ie, high pipe mileage per house) had to put in real replacement monies, and higher density neighborhoods pay their appropriate fee for their pipes. And yup, there should be some really major pipes that we can attribute to everyone as they serve whole chunks of the city.  There will always be some elements of cross-subsidization, maybe call it sharing the risk à la insurance, but the pass-the-buck era of stiffing the next generation with the bill has got to stop. As does “equalizing” the bills when it is apparent that low density infrastructure is unsustainable.

Every pedestrian walking the City knows that many sidewalk squares get cracked, heaved, or otherwise broken. Sometimes the squares are too big: when the portion of Somerset between Lyon and Percy was done years ago, the sidewalk squares were huge, and by the first spring half of them had cracked. They were replaced by the contractor, but don’t think that cost wasn’t borne by the taxpayer somewhere, somehow.

The City avoids putting rebars or reinforcing wire mesh into the sidewalks to save on cost. I am not aware that they use thin asphalt on streets to save on cost… in fact, streets themselves seem pretty damn sturdy. I expect engineers figure the carrying load on the sidewalk as being people, with the occasional service truck or snowplow.

But increasingly, I see Hydro Ottawa person-lift trucks (“cherry pickers”) parked on sidewalks, fire engines, and delivery trucks, often really big ones. And during snow clearing, the City feels free to run graders, front end loaders, dump trucks and other heavy equipment on the sidewalks.

The pic is of the two year old sidewalk on Preston right after snow removal. Is it a coincidence that a row of dump trucks parked on the sidewalk? The cracks are brand new, fresh and sharp, not yet filled with sand or salt.  The sidewalk was new too, but now it looks much less so. Thus starts the cycle of water penetration, freeze-thaw lifting, deterioration, and crumbling infrastructure. There were two cracks like the one shown, one in each block.

At the last minute, just in time for the SBL opening,  work crews painted over the ‘wrong’ lines with black paint. This was obviously a short term fix, since the first thing to wear off would be the black paint, revealing the white lines again, which would take even longer to wear off. In the picture above, note the dual stop lines, the multiple cross walk lines, and the ever-lasting little dashes they put down to show the crews where to paint the real lines which somehow wear off much faster than the guide lines.

So here we are midwinter, and the black paint has worn off. The above pic is just a week or two old. But since then Mr Clean has arrived in Ottawa (no, not Larry of Spic and Span fame). Using his Magic Eraser ™, in this case an asphalt grinder, he removed many of the false lines:

And here’s a close up of the bit of cross walk ring left behind after cleansing:

Motorists on cross streets can actually feel these groves if they are braking, so they might have some collateral benefit of improving stopping distances, to the (theoretical) benefit of cyclists on the SBL.

But, in order to get the occupants into the new offices and condos, it seems some current occupants must be displaced:

Alas, the delightful images suggested of disinterring skeletons and relics is abused by the line in bold noting that the graves are empty.

Still, a substitute fantasy must include ghoulish images of cubicle dwellers pushing paper for an eternity, or condo apts that are shaped like mortuary drawers.

You gotta admit it is an unusual sign.