October 27, 2021
Test driving the new city planning religion: the 15-minute neighborhood.
The City of Ottawa Planning Committee approved a new planning concept for the city: a 15-minute neighborhood where one can walk in 15 minutes to the local school, pick up essential groceries, and get to communal facilities like a coffee shop for socializing. The focus is on your ability to pick up all essential goods and services by walking only 15 minutes and avoiding using the car. And the concept envisions a variety of housing at various levels of affordability to provide people with the opportunity to live close to where they work. Wow! If that was that simple.
Besides walking, bicycling is also allowed, but only for 15 minutes, to get to the necessities. Could bicycles be the answer in Ottawa? We have bicycles, but the weather is cold here for six months of the year, and there is snow or ice on the ground. Plus, the snow clearing is not always on time and I, for one, would not want to compete with cars cycling in the snow on the roadbed. Of course, cyclists argue you can do it in Ottawa year-round, but I am yet to see it beyond some adventurous souls in the winter, bundled up in parkas with heavy gloves and face masks to protect themselves from the viciously chilly wind.
Some people even argue that you can go shopping on a bike and carry panniers. One person went further and even suggested a cart attached to your bike that can carry all the groceries for a week for a family of four. I am looking for volunteers so I can take pictures of them.
So, we are left, the average joe, using our two legs to bring to life the 15-minute neighborhood concept. Your legs can carry you for a kilometer in 15 minutes. So our neighborhood extends one kilometer from our home.
The suggestion that we could also consider public transit in the 15-minute period is a non-starter in Ottawa: just walking to a bus stop and waiting for the bus would take 15 minutes.
Now how do you apply this concept to the City of Ottawa, already built? The city will grow, but today it is a physical, built landscape. What happens when I suddenly discover I do not have a Starbucks next to my home or a Tim Horton’s within a kilometer? Do I go to Starbucks and ask them to please come to my neighborhood and open a coffee shop? The city will grow, and assuming vacant land exists in my neighborhood, the city can make the vacant land attractive to Starbucks and similar businesses by zoning and incentives. And in time, in years, the neighborhood could gain these amenities if demand exists. Are our city planners carving up the city into neighborhoods today and identifying what amenities and necessities are missing in each neighborhood?
I thought I’ll test-drive this concept in my neighborhood. It certainly would be an attraction to buy a home with a school in the middle of your neighborhood if you have school-age children at home. There are four school boards in Ottawa: the public English and French boards. And there are the Catholic Boards, both English, and French. Is it reasonable to assume that there would be four primary schools in every one-kilometer radius? You can half the need if you assume English people would move into English areas and the same for the French, so they would have to be two schools in each neighborhood. But I recall that with demographic changes, some neighborhoods emptied of children while the newer growth areas required new schools. And then some of the old schools were taken over by private schools such as the Islamic School in the Fisher Heights area, which used to be a public primary school. Now, there are no primary schools in my neighborhood. But now we have children of primary school age who are bussed. Twice a day there is a caravan of school buses parading across my neighborhood. The 15-minute concept for education is not alive in my neighborhood. The question is; will it ever be?
And the believers of the 15-minute concept also envision a variety of housing styles and price ranges to allow for people to live and work in these neighborhoods at distinct stages of their lives and corresponding to their income levels. Well, the city zoned my neighborhood residential; so, we have an extensive area, subdivided into standard lots with comparable homes on them. Prices are similar for these homes, and people with similar incomes occupy these homes. There is no variety in housing catering to different people; in fact, people like to move into neighborhoods where they find people like themselves. Zoning creates homogeneous areas; you would not find a Tim Horton’s in the middle of a residential zone. You find commercial facilities at the edges of neighborhoods, lining arterial roads. My neighborhood does not have a variety of housing stock, and there are no employment opportunities for our residents. There are service jobs along the arterials and some office jobs further away.
So, what will city planners do in Ottawa? Carve up the city to try rationalizing neighborhoods into amenity-rich neighborhoods? What is the next step in implementing this new concept? The Globe and Mail did a study a year ago looking at the larger cities in Canada and identifying neighborhoods that satisfy criteria comprising a matrix of amenities. The authors found that only 23 percent of Canada’s neighborhoods conformed. In Ottawa, it was 20 percent of the neighborhoods, while the highest percentage was in Vancouver with 72 percent of the neighborhoods.
Where are some examples of this concept? I remember visiting Porthmadog and Criccieth in North Wales, where I saw a variety of stores along the main drag such as a butcher, a bakery, a grocery store, and all the essentials that one needs to live. And I imagine most people worked there as well. There was adequate housing for people of all ages. But these communities are small: Criccieth has a population of 2000, and Porthmadog 4000 people.
Parts of Vancouver, BC, where I lived for eight years, would qualify as well, such as those along Broadway (9th Avenue), 4th Avenue, and Denman Street. There are many small stores along those streets and if one lived close by, one could access all the essential services. But I lived in suburban Washington, DC, Norfolk, VA, and other North American cities, where, without a car would have been difficult to manage. The concept is sustainable in large and dense urban cities and rural small towns, but nowhere in between.
Another issue could throw a monkey-wrench into this concept: the two-income families where husband and wife work far from each other. One couple I knew bought a home in Maxville, ON, halfway between Ottawa and Montreal, over two hundred kilometers, because the husband worked in Ottawa and the wife in Montreal. After a long commute by both, I do not think they walked around in Maxville after work.
Yes, the concept spawns nostalgia in me for the small and self-sufficient towns of the 1950s where you could live and work in a walkable community; but is it sustainable today? What do you think?
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