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Past a faded couch on the front lawn, a trail of garbage leading up the stairs and a bylaw-infraction notice sticking out of the mailbox, three University of Ottawa student workers approach the door of an apartment on Blackburn Avenue in Sandy Hill.
“We’re just coming around to a) welcome you to the neighbourhood and b) let you know about the noise bylaw, which is 11 p.m. If you don’t respect it you get a $400 fine,” U of O community adviser Arielle D’Ippolito tells the young man who answers the door. He interrupts her there. He knows. He’s been fined before.
D’Ippolito – among a group of city and university staff and residents who are visiting spots where there have previously been problems – soldiers on, handing him a gift bag that includes a garbage schedule, parking advice and information about a community yard sale.
Knocking on about 200 doors for a few hours on the first day of the semester is one of the ways Sandy Hill’s two-year-old town and gown committee is trying to help residents and students live together in the historic neighbourhood.
But this kind of outreach, which can be dismissed as soon as the door closes and the bars open, isn’t enough for some people. Many, in Sandy Hill and beyond, are becoming increasingly vocal that more needs to be done to curtail disruptions in neighbourhoods where large numbers of university and college students live.
Students moved into new houses and apartments on the last weekend before the fall university term began, Aug. 30, 2014.
In the past year, several developments have shifted the conversation beyond noise and garbage complaints to whether the city needs to take a smarter, big-picture approach to off-campus student housing:
But tackling student neighbourhoods is a divisive debate, which has drawn the attention of Ontario’s Human Rights Commission when it’s erupted in other university and college towns.
In Ottawa today, there’s even disagreement among the city’s key players about the central questions: Does off-campus student housing really need to be strategized? And if so, how?
Furniture sits on the side of the road in Sandy Hill, — to be moved in or abandoned? — as students, returned on the last weekend before the fall university term started, Aug. 30, 2014.
Tensions between schools and communities aren’t unique to Ottawa or new. In his book Town & Gown: From Conflict to Cooperation, Michael Fox cites the St. Scholastica Day riot of 1355 in Oxford, which began as a dispute between students and townspeople at a tavern.
During the conflict, 63 students and 30 local residents were killed. When it was over, a special charter was created stipulating that the mayor and councillors were to march annually through the streets, paying the university a penny for each scholar killed.
More than 650 years later, Fox says, many schools and municipalities remain awkward neighbours.
“There’s been a laissez-faire attitude: ‘Let’s go about our own business and if there’s a problem then we’ll deal with it,’” says Fox. “Of course, what we’ve seen time and time again, is unfortunate events happen.”
With post-secondary enrolment up more than 43 per cent in Ontario since 2002, the pressure to stop history from repeating itself every September is growing in communities across the province.
Last year, Yinzhou Xiao studied Ontario university and college towns for her master’s degree in planning at the University of Waterloo.
She found the same story over and over: Residents close to campuses feel their neighbourhoods have turned into “student ghettos,” with noise, garbage and parking nightmares.
“The problem is, a lot of universities are surrounded by low-density neighbourhoods,” she says.
“There’s a trend that families are moving out from these neighbourhoods, and these houses, where families lived, they’re converted into student housing with more units, more density, and in a lot of cases the physical environment is deteriorating.”
Related
Some cities have responded. Xiao found at least six – Waterloo, London, Kingston, Oshawa, Hamilton and Barrie – set out formal strategies for student accommodation or neighbourhoods. The plans, the same kind being asked for in Ottawa, had various goals: attracting private student residences to strategic spots, setting an expected ratio of students to long-term residents, asking for off-campus codes of conduct, or just getting precise data on where students live.
“I can’t say there’s a single solution because cities have different political or economic contexts,“ says Xiao. “These neighbourhoods … they’re at different stages of studentification.”
That’s certainly true of the areas around Carleton University, the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College.
In the 1990s, before student populations exploded, relations were strained between Carleton students and their neighbours Old Ottawa South. Mayor Jim Watson, then a councillor who lived in the neighbourhood, says he resolved some of those tensions with his lawn mower, pizza and flyers.
One of the biggest complaints he heard was that students didn’t mow their lawns.
“So I started lending out my lawnmower,” Watson says. “I put a flyer around the neighbourhood and I had about 20 groups of students that would come and I’d just leave it on my back porch. It was a push one. And it solved a lot of the problems.”
Watson also created a committee, much like the Sandy Hill town and gown committee, consisting of police, city and university staff and others from the community.
They held welcome parties for students and made sure students knew their rights and responsibilities – by having pizzerias send deliveries out with posters outlining how to get along with neighbours.
Since then, the need for such a committee has disappeared, says Coun. David Chernushenko, who now represents Capital ward.
He moved to Old Ottawa South in the 1990s and remembers the out-of-hand street parties. These days, he says, only a handful of problem addresses are among the “student housing sprinkled throughout” the neighbourhood, generally from Bronson Avenue to Bank Street.
There are a few reasons for the relative peace today, despite the university’s growth from 18,700 full-time students a decade ago to 23,800 this year. Chief among them is that Carleton had land to keep building on-campus residences and the O-Train arrived in 2001, allowing students to live farther away.
“On a typical academic term (weekday morning) … the O-Train pours people out, coming from both directions,” says director of housing David Sterritt.
But while the pains of studentification may be largely a part of Old Ottawa South’s past, in Sandy Hill, they are very much a part of the present.
Unlike Carleton, land is scarce at the University of Ottawa, which is practically landlocked by the Rideau Canal and Sandy Hill. But like most Ontario campuses, the school has undergone unprecedented growth. This fall, about 35,300 full-time students are expected, an increase of more than 10,000 from a decade ago.
“Things were happening so fast that it was very difficult to plan for them,” says U of O’s executive director of physical resources, Claudio Brun del Re.
No caption, leave this text or replace image
On-campus residence spaces haven’t kept pace. Even after announcing two new housing projects this year, U of O is looking for 635 more spaces – just to meet freshman demand.
Off campus, where students tend to live after first year, problems have been exacerbated by a spate of housing conversions in Sandy Hill. Family homes were being transformed into dorm-like apartments, driving longtime residents out.
Michael and Arlene McGinn, who moved to Henderson Avenue as students in 1979, have had a front-row seat to dozens of frosh weeks.
“The first week of September, I never call the city, unless I hear broken bottles,” says Arlene. “We’re tolerant. We put up with more noise than most people.”
For those who do call, the city says it is doing what it can. At a June town and gown meeting, bylaw stats were presented, showing enforcement has ramped up, including through a zero tolerance approach after 11 p.m. In the first quarter of this year, there were 350 noise calls in the ward, compared to 530 the year before.
Coun. Mathieu Fleury, who represents the neighbourhood, took things a step further ahead of move-in weekend. His office sent a letter to a dozen owners of “problematic addresses,” asking them to a closed-door meeting.
If landlords chose not to attend, the letter stated, investigation and enforcement “will be increased to the full extent possible by the various agencies involved.”
At the meeting, some landlords honestly seemed to not know their tenants had drawn so much attention from the city, said Eastern Ontario Landlord Organization chairman John Dickie, who is now looking for ways the city can share tenant concerns with landlords without violating privacy legislation.
“We didn’t target a landlord or a person, we targeted the 16 properties that had the most calls in the last three years, and we attached that property to the owner,” says Fleury, who describes those who showed up as being happy once they realized the city was trying to work with them to reduce complaint calls.
Also, after a year-long freeze on housing conversions, the city has also now closed the loophole that allowed developers to add units without much scrutiny.
All of this comes too late for the McGinns. The expansion of the home backing onto theirs had already started and they’ve put their home up for sale.
“We see the writing’s on the wall: Get out of here,” Arlene says.
Across town, residents in the Ryan Farm and City View neighbourhoods near Algonquin are closely following the developments in Sandy Hill. What’s happening there, some fear, offers a glimpse of their future.
The combination of limited residence rooms for an expanding student body is the case there, as well. Enrolment at the college has risen from about 11,000 full-time students in 2002 to 17,170 this fall. On-campus residence, run by a private company, houses about 1,000 students and the school has no plans to expand it.
“It’s not our bread and butter,” says Algonquin director of physical resources John Tattersall. “It’s not what we’re here for.”
Neighbours, who check out nearby rentals on the website Kijiji and ask students about their housing, say they’re seeing traces of what’s played out near other campuses.
“We notice more cars and just the lack of upkeep on the outside of the houses,” says John Makadi, who moved to David Drive decades ago, when there was still farmland in the area. “You can very easily spot which ones have owners who take pride in their properties and which ones are, I’ll call them the ‘absentee landlords.’ “
John Makadi lives on David Drive near Algonquin College.
“Illegal rooming houses” is the term used by College ward Coun. Rick Chiarelli to describe homes being secretly converted for more tenants than planned. He says it’s time to do something about the properties – which bylaw officers can’t access without a warrant or an invitation – because residents don’t want “to become another Sandy Hill.”
Chiarelli introduced a motion in June to the community and protective services committee, asking bylaw to study the possibility of licensing landlords and other enforcement solutions for places where students live. The committee broadened the review, expected to finish mid-2015, to look at what a city-wide approach would look like as well.
But residents calling for a student strategy say the issue is more about long-term planning than enforcement. One reason for the push is the LRT, which will make it easier for all students to live farther from campus, where rent is cheaper. South Keys saw that happen after the O-Train came into service.
Also on the horizon are more private developers building or maintaining off-campus residences, which has been a longer-standing practice in the U.S.
This summer, Campus Suites Inc. president Henry Morton bought the downtown Cooper Street Holiday Inn, where he plans to create student housing, with security and housing staff.
Anecdotally, he’s heard 3,000 beds are needed for both universities. He’s also expecting continued growth at both universities and more international students, whose parents might be more inclined to chip in extra money for higher-end accommodation, as opposed to old homes with lots of students living in them.
“We saw the market, liked the market, knew what the schools were doing,” says Morton. “We felt very comfortable with it and believe there’s a lack of competition and a lack of quality housing here, so we felt there was a market that would be very receptive to what we want to do.”
Predictably, not everyone is as receptive as the market.
Henry Morton is redeveloping the old Holiday Inn at 111 Cooper St. into a student housing complex.
“When we found out, I wasn’t very happy,” said Hans Koeck, 70, who has lived across the street from the hotel for 28 years. “Let’s face it — it’s a quiet residential area. I have nothing against students, I was a student too, but they’re rowdy.”
There may soon be another private residence on Laurier Avenue East and Friel Street. Council nixed plans for the building at a meeting in March, when the mayor said the development’s density didn’t fit with the neighbourhood. The developer’s appeal will be heard in October by the Ontario Municipal Board, which has the ability to overturn the city’s decision. The board recently allowed a controversial private residence in downtown Toronto.
Barry Hauer, who is set to start building his own private residence on Mann Avenue this month, said much attention is being paid to the Ottawa case. If the developer prevails, he expects more private residences to be built nearby.
“The University of Ottawa, I believe, proportionately has the least amount of available beds per student, compared to any other university in Ontario,” says Hauer, of available housing near campus.
All of this is driving the call for a fundamental shift in how the city deals with student housing, one that smaller Ontario municipalities have embraced.
“We think there are issues that are much bigger than Sandy Hill. Both universities and Algonquin, there are so many things in common that we’d really like to see tackled in a very serious way,” says Bob Forbes, vice-president of Action Sandy Hill, one of the community associations that pleaded with Watson for a student accommodation strategy in a February letter.
“It’s a good thing universities are growing in Canada. This is really important. We’re never going back to a manufacturing-based economy, we need highly educated people, so if we’re going to grow — that’s an excellent thing for Canada. But to grow without planning is really quite irresponsible,” Forbes says.
Bob Forbes, vice-president of Action Sandy Hill.
After calling on the city to come up with the strategy to no avail, Forbes and his group are now taking matters into their own hands, focusing on researching best practices from other places that Ottawa should adopt.
Oshawa, for example, drafted a student-accommodation strategy four years ago to deal with rapid growth at Durham College, Trent University’s campus there and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which opened in 2003.
“We did this to support the university and to support great choice for the students, and that has all kinds of intangible positives for Oshawa,” says the city’s commissioner of development services Tom Hodgins.
Some plans, like Oshawa’s, have zeroed-in on the best places for student housing development, based on expected enrolment and existing neighbourhoods. There have been 2,800 new off-campus beds built according to the strategy. Oshawa also asked schools to hold housing fairs for students, to collect data on where students live and questioned whether they would develop off-campus codes of conduct.
In Barrie, the city offered financial incentives for people willing to develop 11 specific properties, hoping to minimize the impact of student housing on residential areas.
Some cities shy away from planning for students because they don’t want to look like they’re discriminating, says researcher Xiao, who found many municipalities mentioned the need for the right mix between students and long-term residents. But when she asked what the right ratio would be, few were willing to put a number to it.
“(That) would be people zoning. We are not permitted to do that by law,” one planner told Xiao.
But Ontario Human Rights Commission chief commissioner Barbara Hall, who has become involved in municipal responses to students, says student-focused plans are fine, as long as they’re focused on creating housing and don’t restrict where people can live.
She says landlord licensing shouldn’t only apply to areas with student populations, though. “If these are legitimate planning issues, then they should apply wherever people live,” Hall says. “And if they are in just one place then it, you know, suggests quite strongly that it’s just targeting one group of people.”
Watson, for one, is not convinced a student plan or licensing is necessary in Ottawa. The city’s official plan identifies growth areas and there is already a comprehensive transportation plan, he says.
“We don’t go around and plan where seniors should live and we don’t go around and plan where engineers should live,” he says. “So why should we have this special status for students?”
Councillors representing campus areas, however, say a municipal student plan is worth considering.
Chernushenko, whose ward includes Carleton and part of U of O, says the city ought to understand how campuses will grow and what housing will be needed.
“It’s time to deal with this in partnership with universities and colleges sitting around the same table and planning,” Chernushenko says. “Call it a strategy or a plan, it’s about getting together and better understanding what the needs are now and what they’re going to be.
“Is the problem really about landlords taking advantage of a student market, to squeeze many people in and undermine the character of a neighbourhood? Is that the biggest problem? Or is the problem of the future going to be private-sector developers building great big towers, which they’re putting students into and the issues that will come with that — that’s what I’d like to understand,” he says.
Chernushenko says he recently met with city planners to see what can and needs to be done, though requests to interview a planner about the issue were denied. “Student housing is a bylaw matter and planning has no involvement,” city spokeswoman Courtney Ferguson said in an email.
For Fleury, a strategy could be a good idea in the future. But to avoid doing too much at once, he says, the city should first deal with the results of its licensing review, update Sandy Hill community planning documents and await U of O’s campus master plan.
“We have to recognize 10 per cent of our population is post-secondary students in the city,” Fleury says. “We thrive on it and it also has impacts on our day-to-day, so what that means for our future, we just have to analyze it.”
While officials at U of O and Algonquin said they were either impartial or hadn’t considered whether the city should have a student strategy, Carleton’s director of student affairs Ryan Flannagan said it’s worth thinking about.
“We would appreciate clarity and a plan in place so our students know what the lay of the land is, moving forward so they can plan accordingly,” Flannagan says.
“We would welcome any type of plan that is moderate and reasonable, that sets a reasonable playing field in place for everybody: students, landlords, community members. I think that’s just smart urban planning on the part of the city.”
23,800
Number of full-time students at Carleton this fall
5,000+
How many more full-time students there are compared to a decade ago
35,300
Number of full-time students at University of Ottawa this fall
10,000+
How many more full-time students there are compared to a decade ago
17,170
Number of full-time students at Algonquin College this fall
6,000 +
How many more full-time students there are compared to 2002
cmills@ottawacitizen.com
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“We’re just coming around to a) welcome you to the neighbourhood and b) let you know about the noise bylaw, which is 11 p.m. If you don’t respect it you get a $400 fine,” U of O community adviser Arielle D’Ippolito tells the young man who answers the door. He interrupts her there. He knows. He’s been fined before.
D’Ippolito – among a group of city and university staff and residents who are visiting spots where there have previously been problems – soldiers on, handing him a gift bag that includes a garbage schedule, parking advice and information about a community yard sale.
Knocking on about 200 doors for a few hours on the first day of the semester is one of the ways Sandy Hill’s two-year-old town and gown committee is trying to help residents and students live together in the historic neighbourhood.
But this kind of outreach, which can be dismissed as soon as the door closes and the bars open, isn’t enough for some people. Many, in Sandy Hill and beyond, are becoming increasingly vocal that more needs to be done to curtail disruptions in neighbourhoods where large numbers of university and college students live.
Students moved into new houses and apartments on the last weekend before the fall university term began, Aug. 30, 2014.
In the past year, several developments have shifted the conversation beyond noise and garbage complaints to whether the city needs to take a smarter, big-picture approach to off-campus student housing:
- In February, following proposals for large-scale private student housing and in anticipation of light-rail transit, 10 community associations – whose members say Ottawa has a student housing “crisis” – asked the city for a comprehensive accommodation strategy. It would be similar to plans some smaller Ontario cities have developed to at least anticipate student-housing demand;
- In March, city council shut down a private developer’s proposal to build a nine-storey student housing complex at Laurier Avenue East and Friel Street. That wasn’t the end of it, though. Next month the city must defend its decision before the Ontario Municipal Board;
- In April, council closed the loophole that previously allowed homes, frequently in student neighbourhoods, to be converted into apartments with little oversight;
- In June, bylaw staff were ordered to study the possibility of landlord licensing, which could include mandatory inspections and fees, to deal with students renting homes that may have been illegally altered to fit more people in;
- This month construction begins on a nine-storey private student residence on Mann Avenue, steps from the University of Ottawa. Earlier this summer, another developer snapped up a downtown hotel to turn it into residence for next fall.
- These and other developments underpin calls for the city to take a broader look at what it means to play host to tens of thousands of students each year.
But tackling student neighbourhoods is a divisive debate, which has drawn the attention of Ontario’s Human Rights Commission when it’s erupted in other university and college towns.
In Ottawa today, there’s even disagreement among the city’s key players about the central questions: Does off-campus student housing really need to be strategized? And if so, how?
Furniture sits on the side of the road in Sandy Hill, — to be moved in or abandoned? — as students, returned on the last weekend before the fall university term started, Aug. 30, 2014.
Tensions between schools and communities aren’t unique to Ottawa or new. In his book Town & Gown: From Conflict to Cooperation, Michael Fox cites the St. Scholastica Day riot of 1355 in Oxford, which began as a dispute between students and townspeople at a tavern.
During the conflict, 63 students and 30 local residents were killed. When it was over, a special charter was created stipulating that the mayor and councillors were to march annually through the streets, paying the university a penny for each scholar killed.
More than 650 years later, Fox says, many schools and municipalities remain awkward neighbours.
“There’s been a laissez-faire attitude: ‘Let’s go about our own business and if there’s a problem then we’ll deal with it,’” says Fox. “Of course, what we’ve seen time and time again, is unfortunate events happen.”
With post-secondary enrolment up more than 43 per cent in Ontario since 2002, the pressure to stop history from repeating itself every September is growing in communities across the province.
Last year, Yinzhou Xiao studied Ontario university and college towns for her master’s degree in planning at the University of Waterloo.
She found the same story over and over: Residents close to campuses feel their neighbourhoods have turned into “student ghettos,” with noise, garbage and parking nightmares.
“The problem is, a lot of universities are surrounded by low-density neighbourhoods,” she says.
“There’s a trend that families are moving out from these neighbourhoods, and these houses, where families lived, they’re converted into student housing with more units, more density, and in a lot of cases the physical environment is deteriorating.”
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Some cities have responded. Xiao found at least six – Waterloo, London, Kingston, Oshawa, Hamilton and Barrie – set out formal strategies for student accommodation or neighbourhoods. The plans, the same kind being asked for in Ottawa, had various goals: attracting private student residences to strategic spots, setting an expected ratio of students to long-term residents, asking for off-campus codes of conduct, or just getting precise data on where students live.
“I can’t say there’s a single solution because cities have different political or economic contexts,“ says Xiao. “These neighbourhoods … they’re at different stages of studentification.”
That’s certainly true of the areas around Carleton University, the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College.
In the 1990s, before student populations exploded, relations were strained between Carleton students and their neighbours Old Ottawa South. Mayor Jim Watson, then a councillor who lived in the neighbourhood, says he resolved some of those tensions with his lawn mower, pizza and flyers.
One of the biggest complaints he heard was that students didn’t mow their lawns.
“So I started lending out my lawnmower,” Watson says. “I put a flyer around the neighbourhood and I had about 20 groups of students that would come and I’d just leave it on my back porch. It was a push one. And it solved a lot of the problems.”
Watson also created a committee, much like the Sandy Hill town and gown committee, consisting of police, city and university staff and others from the community.
They held welcome parties for students and made sure students knew their rights and responsibilities – by having pizzerias send deliveries out with posters outlining how to get along with neighbours.
Since then, the need for such a committee has disappeared, says Coun. David Chernushenko, who now represents Capital ward.
He moved to Old Ottawa South in the 1990s and remembers the out-of-hand street parties. These days, he says, only a handful of problem addresses are among the “student housing sprinkled throughout” the neighbourhood, generally from Bronson Avenue to Bank Street.
There are a few reasons for the relative peace today, despite the university’s growth from 18,700 full-time students a decade ago to 23,800 this year. Chief among them is that Carleton had land to keep building on-campus residences and the O-Train arrived in 2001, allowing students to live farther away.
“On a typical academic term (weekday morning) … the O-Train pours people out, coming from both directions,” says director of housing David Sterritt.
But while the pains of studentification may be largely a part of Old Ottawa South’s past, in Sandy Hill, they are very much a part of the present.
Unlike Carleton, land is scarce at the University of Ottawa, which is practically landlocked by the Rideau Canal and Sandy Hill. But like most Ontario campuses, the school has undergone unprecedented growth. This fall, about 35,300 full-time students are expected, an increase of more than 10,000 from a decade ago.
“Things were happening so fast that it was very difficult to plan for them,” says U of O’s executive director of physical resources, Claudio Brun del Re.
No caption, leave this text or replace image
On-campus residence spaces haven’t kept pace. Even after announcing two new housing projects this year, U of O is looking for 635 more spaces – just to meet freshman demand.
Off campus, where students tend to live after first year, problems have been exacerbated by a spate of housing conversions in Sandy Hill. Family homes were being transformed into dorm-like apartments, driving longtime residents out.
Michael and Arlene McGinn, who moved to Henderson Avenue as students in 1979, have had a front-row seat to dozens of frosh weeks.
“The first week of September, I never call the city, unless I hear broken bottles,” says Arlene. “We’re tolerant. We put up with more noise than most people.”
For those who do call, the city says it is doing what it can. At a June town and gown meeting, bylaw stats were presented, showing enforcement has ramped up, including through a zero tolerance approach after 11 p.m. In the first quarter of this year, there were 350 noise calls in the ward, compared to 530 the year before.
Coun. Mathieu Fleury, who represents the neighbourhood, took things a step further ahead of move-in weekend. His office sent a letter to a dozen owners of “problematic addresses,” asking them to a closed-door meeting.
If landlords chose not to attend, the letter stated, investigation and enforcement “will be increased to the full extent possible by the various agencies involved.”
At the meeting, some landlords honestly seemed to not know their tenants had drawn so much attention from the city, said Eastern Ontario Landlord Organization chairman John Dickie, who is now looking for ways the city can share tenant concerns with landlords without violating privacy legislation.
“We didn’t target a landlord or a person, we targeted the 16 properties that had the most calls in the last three years, and we attached that property to the owner,” says Fleury, who describes those who showed up as being happy once they realized the city was trying to work with them to reduce complaint calls.
Also, after a year-long freeze on housing conversions, the city has also now closed the loophole that allowed developers to add units without much scrutiny.
All of this comes too late for the McGinns. The expansion of the home backing onto theirs had already started and they’ve put their home up for sale.
“We see the writing’s on the wall: Get out of here,” Arlene says.
Across town, residents in the Ryan Farm and City View neighbourhoods near Algonquin are closely following the developments in Sandy Hill. What’s happening there, some fear, offers a glimpse of their future.
The combination of limited residence rooms for an expanding student body is the case there, as well. Enrolment at the college has risen from about 11,000 full-time students in 2002 to 17,170 this fall. On-campus residence, run by a private company, houses about 1,000 students and the school has no plans to expand it.
“It’s not our bread and butter,” says Algonquin director of physical resources John Tattersall. “It’s not what we’re here for.”
Neighbours, who check out nearby rentals on the website Kijiji and ask students about their housing, say they’re seeing traces of what’s played out near other campuses.
“We notice more cars and just the lack of upkeep on the outside of the houses,” says John Makadi, who moved to David Drive decades ago, when there was still farmland in the area. “You can very easily spot which ones have owners who take pride in their properties and which ones are, I’ll call them the ‘absentee landlords.’ “
John Makadi lives on David Drive near Algonquin College.
“Illegal rooming houses” is the term used by College ward Coun. Rick Chiarelli to describe homes being secretly converted for more tenants than planned. He says it’s time to do something about the properties – which bylaw officers can’t access without a warrant or an invitation – because residents don’t want “to become another Sandy Hill.”
Chiarelli introduced a motion in June to the community and protective services committee, asking bylaw to study the possibility of licensing landlords and other enforcement solutions for places where students live. The committee broadened the review, expected to finish mid-2015, to look at what a city-wide approach would look like as well.
But residents calling for a student strategy say the issue is more about long-term planning than enforcement. One reason for the push is the LRT, which will make it easier for all students to live farther from campus, where rent is cheaper. South Keys saw that happen after the O-Train came into service.
Also on the horizon are more private developers building or maintaining off-campus residences, which has been a longer-standing practice in the U.S.
This summer, Campus Suites Inc. president Henry Morton bought the downtown Cooper Street Holiday Inn, where he plans to create student housing, with security and housing staff.
Anecdotally, he’s heard 3,000 beds are needed for both universities. He’s also expecting continued growth at both universities and more international students, whose parents might be more inclined to chip in extra money for higher-end accommodation, as opposed to old homes with lots of students living in them.
“We saw the market, liked the market, knew what the schools were doing,” says Morton. “We felt very comfortable with it and believe there’s a lack of competition and a lack of quality housing here, so we felt there was a market that would be very receptive to what we want to do.”
Predictably, not everyone is as receptive as the market.
Henry Morton is redeveloping the old Holiday Inn at 111 Cooper St. into a student housing complex.
“When we found out, I wasn’t very happy,” said Hans Koeck, 70, who has lived across the street from the hotel for 28 years. “Let’s face it — it’s a quiet residential area. I have nothing against students, I was a student too, but they’re rowdy.”
There may soon be another private residence on Laurier Avenue East and Friel Street. Council nixed plans for the building at a meeting in March, when the mayor said the development’s density didn’t fit with the neighbourhood. The developer’s appeal will be heard in October by the Ontario Municipal Board, which has the ability to overturn the city’s decision. The board recently allowed a controversial private residence in downtown Toronto.
Barry Hauer, who is set to start building his own private residence on Mann Avenue this month, said much attention is being paid to the Ottawa case. If the developer prevails, he expects more private residences to be built nearby.
“The University of Ottawa, I believe, proportionately has the least amount of available beds per student, compared to any other university in Ontario,” says Hauer, of available housing near campus.
All of this is driving the call for a fundamental shift in how the city deals with student housing, one that smaller Ontario municipalities have embraced.
“We think there are issues that are much bigger than Sandy Hill. Both universities and Algonquin, there are so many things in common that we’d really like to see tackled in a very serious way,” says Bob Forbes, vice-president of Action Sandy Hill, one of the community associations that pleaded with Watson for a student accommodation strategy in a February letter.
“It’s a good thing universities are growing in Canada. This is really important. We’re never going back to a manufacturing-based economy, we need highly educated people, so if we’re going to grow — that’s an excellent thing for Canada. But to grow without planning is really quite irresponsible,” Forbes says.
Bob Forbes, vice-president of Action Sandy Hill.
After calling on the city to come up with the strategy to no avail, Forbes and his group are now taking matters into their own hands, focusing on researching best practices from other places that Ottawa should adopt.
Oshawa, for example, drafted a student-accommodation strategy four years ago to deal with rapid growth at Durham College, Trent University’s campus there and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which opened in 2003.
“We did this to support the university and to support great choice for the students, and that has all kinds of intangible positives for Oshawa,” says the city’s commissioner of development services Tom Hodgins.
Some plans, like Oshawa’s, have zeroed-in on the best places for student housing development, based on expected enrolment and existing neighbourhoods. There have been 2,800 new off-campus beds built according to the strategy. Oshawa also asked schools to hold housing fairs for students, to collect data on where students live and questioned whether they would develop off-campus codes of conduct.
In Barrie, the city offered financial incentives for people willing to develop 11 specific properties, hoping to minimize the impact of student housing on residential areas.
Some cities shy away from planning for students because they don’t want to look like they’re discriminating, says researcher Xiao, who found many municipalities mentioned the need for the right mix between students and long-term residents. But when she asked what the right ratio would be, few were willing to put a number to it.
“(That) would be people zoning. We are not permitted to do that by law,” one planner told Xiao.
But Ontario Human Rights Commission chief commissioner Barbara Hall, who has become involved in municipal responses to students, says student-focused plans are fine, as long as they’re focused on creating housing and don’t restrict where people can live.
She says landlord licensing shouldn’t only apply to areas with student populations, though. “If these are legitimate planning issues, then they should apply wherever people live,” Hall says. “And if they are in just one place then it, you know, suggests quite strongly that it’s just targeting one group of people.”
Watson, for one, is not convinced a student plan or licensing is necessary in Ottawa. The city’s official plan identifies growth areas and there is already a comprehensive transportation plan, he says.
“We don’t go around and plan where seniors should live and we don’t go around and plan where engineers should live,” he says. “So why should we have this special status for students?”
Councillors representing campus areas, however, say a municipal student plan is worth considering.
Chernushenko, whose ward includes Carleton and part of U of O, says the city ought to understand how campuses will grow and what housing will be needed.
“It’s time to deal with this in partnership with universities and colleges sitting around the same table and planning,” Chernushenko says. “Call it a strategy or a plan, it’s about getting together and better understanding what the needs are now and what they’re going to be.
“Is the problem really about landlords taking advantage of a student market, to squeeze many people in and undermine the character of a neighbourhood? Is that the biggest problem? Or is the problem of the future going to be private-sector developers building great big towers, which they’re putting students into and the issues that will come with that — that’s what I’d like to understand,” he says.
Chernushenko says he recently met with city planners to see what can and needs to be done, though requests to interview a planner about the issue were denied. “Student housing is a bylaw matter and planning has no involvement,” city spokeswoman Courtney Ferguson said in an email.
For Fleury, a strategy could be a good idea in the future. But to avoid doing too much at once, he says, the city should first deal with the results of its licensing review, update Sandy Hill community planning documents and await U of O’s campus master plan.
“We have to recognize 10 per cent of our population is post-secondary students in the city,” Fleury says. “We thrive on it and it also has impacts on our day-to-day, so what that means for our future, we just have to analyze it.”
While officials at U of O and Algonquin said they were either impartial or hadn’t considered whether the city should have a student strategy, Carleton’s director of student affairs Ryan Flannagan said it’s worth thinking about.
“We would appreciate clarity and a plan in place so our students know what the lay of the land is, moving forward so they can plan accordingly,” Flannagan says.
“We would welcome any type of plan that is moderate and reasonable, that sets a reasonable playing field in place for everybody: students, landlords, community members. I think that’s just smart urban planning on the part of the city.”
23,800
Number of full-time students at Carleton this fall
5,000+
How many more full-time students there are compared to a decade ago
35,300
Number of full-time students at University of Ottawa this fall
10,000+
How many more full-time students there are compared to a decade ago
17,170
Number of full-time students at Algonquin College this fall
6,000 +
How many more full-time students there are compared to 2002
cmills@ottawacitizen.com
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