Developers seek to expand Ottawa suburbs after Ontario rules rewritten
City faces challenges to its $1.8 million fee at the Ontario Land Tribunal
Several Ottawa housing developers have already taken advantage of a significant change to Ontario planning rules and made individual requests to the City of Ottawa aimed at having their large rural properties earmarked for future subdivisions.
But they haven't necessarily agreed with the hefty $1.8 million fee council decided to charge or the list of technical studies it required, so developers have filed at least four or five appeals and put the city on the defensive at the Ontario Land Tribunal in recent months.
The Ontario government's new provincial planning statement took effect last October. Within days, paperwork was submitted to city planners to expand the urban boundary by hundreds of hectares north of Kanata, in the Cedarview area of Barrhaven, and on the edge of Stittsville.
Others are seeking a big possible expansion east of the Findlay Creek neighbourhood.
The chief financial officer of Claridge Homes, Neil Malhotra, says developers need to get those tracts of land in the pipeline because it can take many years before any construction starts.
Plus, Malhotra argues the City of Ottawa hasn't calculated setting aside enough land to meet the growing market need. That's greatly driven up the price of land, which in turn has made housing more expensive for buyers, he says.
"I think everybody in the industry would tell you that there's been a shortage of land supply in the city ... based on demand, for a long time," said Malhotra. Buyers are looking for single-detached homes in the suburbs, especially since the pandemic created work-from-home arrangements, he says.
Big change last October
It didn't used to be that expansions of the city's urban boundary or the size of a rural village could happen at any time. They could only take place after a detailed city-wide review of what land was required for future homes and where it made most sense to grow.
The last such process in 2020 and 2021 was high stakes because developers had a rare window to get their lands on the developable side of the urban-rural divide. Ottawa city council decided to expand by 1,281 hectares and to greenlight the future Tewin community in the rural southeast.
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The Ford government has since struck the words "comprehensive review" from its policy, however, and now developers whose lands were left out in the past have this new method to get in.
Properties left out try to get in
The lands owned by Claridge Homes have been on the verge of being developable a few times.
The company has several properties on March Road north of the Kanata tech park, other lands in the Leitrim area east of Findlay Creek, and yet more land on Flewellyn and Fernbank roads on the edge of Stittsville.
In recent years, they have been left out of the urban boundary by city council or city staff, then put in unilaterally by former housing minister Steve Clark, only to be taken out again by the Progressive Conservatives after the scandal over the Ontario Greenbelt.
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Now, a sign is erected along March Road for the South March lands where Claridge, Minto Communities, Mattamy Homes, Regional Group and Uniform Urban Developments have plans to build more than 4,000 homes.
The city is accepting the public's comments until May 28 about the companies' bid to add 233.5 hectares inside the urban boundary. The lands had previously received high scores in 2021 from city staff for being close to transit and water infrastructure.
City staff and politicians have expected these and other properties to be eventually urbanized in the future. After all, the Ontario government requires municipalities to keep a 15-year supply of land to meet the needs of a growing population.
But last fall, staff warned the Ontario government's shift from a comprehensive to piecemeal approach could create problems for their detailed plans about when and where transportation and water infrastructure would be needed. Extra staff have since been assigned to review individual urban expansion applications instead of doing other planning work.
"We as a city would have hoped for a more coherent process, a process that allows us to add the right lands into the urban boundary, but events are simply overtaking us as a result of provincial changes and quasi-judicial decisions," said Coun. Jeff Leiper, who chairs Ottawa's planning and housing committee.
Leiper says it was predictable that developers would move quickly to apply for urban expansions once the government changed the process.
Land tribunal cases
Leiper isn't surprised either that the city is having to defend itself in multiple cases at the Ontario Land Tribunal.
"This is the process of the province has created," he said.
On May 8, the tribunal ruled in favour of development companies Caivan and Mattamy and deemed their applications for urban expansion were complete even though they didn't meet the city's new requirements, approved last October.
According to those tribunal documents, Caivan wants to expand the urban area so its Stittsville South development can reach the corner of Flewellyn Road at Shea Road.
Mattamy Homes, meanwhile, has plans for 1,492 detached homes, townhouses and apartments in Barrhaven between Highway 416 and the Cedarhill Golf and Country Club, where it used to have plans for estate lots.
Other cases are still before the tribunal for a different reason.
Claridge Homes is leading appeals on behalf of the South March landowners. It is also leading an appeal for some 244 hectares east of Findlay Creek, owned by Claridge, Richcraft, Mattamy and Urbandale.
In both cases, Claridge argues a $1.8 million fee the city is charging is excessive and goes far beyond covering the costs of reviewing an application. Claridge paid the fee "under protest," the documents say.
"Pending the outcome of the Ontario Land Tribunal's decision, it is possible that the city may need to revisit the application fees for expansion proposals and the associated study requirements," wrote Royce Fu, the City of Ottawa's manager of policy planning.
Updating projections anew
Against this backdrop of individual urban expansions and legal challenges, the City of Ottawa is about to kick off the process of projecting Ottawa's future growth all over again at a special committee meeting on June 18.
A lot hangs on those projections, which the city develops using Ministry of Finance population projections and Statistics Canada data. The city considers how much land it needs for future homes and future jobs, and those projections are then used to calculate required land supply and housing targets.
The figures the city used in the last round have regularly been contested by the development industry. It points to how the Ministry of Finance estimated that Ottawa would grow to 1.66 million people by 2046 — an extra 200,000 people compared to the 1.4 million city had estimated when it crafted its 2021 official plan.
Malhotra says the city needs to get its estimates right to make the right plans, or else high house prices will dissuade people from living in Ottawa.
"These people are coming to this community one way or another. We have to figure out how to house the people if we're going to have kind of a functional economy in the city," said Malhotra.
It could take 12 to 18 months for the city to update its projections and assess which rural lands should be converted for urban areas.
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