A plan that could see up to 120 housing units demolished as part of Stage 3 of Ottawa’s light-rail transit system got the green light at the city’s transportation committee on Monday, as councillors looked to find solutions for residents who might be displaced by the development.
The transportation committee approved staff’s recommended route for a potential LRT expansion out to the city’s southwest end, which could see light rail connect Baseline Station to Barrhaven Town Centre many years down the line.
The long horizon between the initial approval, which still requires sign-off from city council, and any shovels in the ground gives staff time to mitigate the impact on any displaced residents from the Manor Village and Cheryl Gardens neighbourhoods, ward councillor Keith Egli said at Monday’s meeting.
Egli acknowledged, however, that the spectre of demolition and eviction hanging over residents’ heads is stressful.
He crafted a motion, presented by colleague Matthew Luloff and unanimously passed, to direct staff to work with residents and other city players such as Ottawa Community Housing to ensure the neighbourhood would have some measure of clarity on housing transition options by the end of 2021.
“I think that there is a will — within the city, within this committee, within senior staff — to work with the community to come up with a number of options to address this impact on your lives,” Egli said.
Many of the residents of Manor Village are low-income families, who told Global News last week that they’re afraid they’ll be on the streets if the LRT “demoviction” goes through.
Fourteen delegations signed up to speak on the plan at transportation committee on Monday, most of which were residents or housing advocates pushing councillors to vote no on the proposal.
Resident concerns were not limited to the roofs over their heads, but extended to the support of the Manor Village community.
With tears welling up, single mother and ACORN Ottawa member Alison Trowbridge described her son’s unstable mental health and his previous attempts to harm himself, which have been mitigated thanks to the community around him in Manor Village.
Resident Peggy Rafter said she moved to the neighbourhood more than 30 years ago with her two kids after fleeing an abusive relationship. Like Trowbridge, she said she found the support she needed to raise her family from the tightly knit community of Manor Village.
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“The community really embodies the saying, ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’” Rafter said.
“If this community is destroyed, all of us will be lost.”
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper concurred with Elgi’s sentiment that city staff can work to find a solution that avoids pushing residents out onto the street or into housing they can’t afford, but he also voiced the skepticism of residents that the city could deliver on those promises after declaring a housing and homelessness emergency earlier this year.
“If I were the residents, I wouldn’t trust us either,” Leiper said.
Leiper and Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury supported a motion from Capital Coun. Shawn Menard on Monday that would’ve seen the rest of the proposal passed but had a hold placed on the planned alignment for the LRT track so that staff could more closely evaluate five other alternatives for the “pinch point” along Woodroffe Avenue.
The seven other members of the transportation committee voted down Menard’s motion on Monday, with chair Tim Tierney saying he was “confident” Egli’s proposal will satisfy resident concerns and expressing his support for staff’s decision-making process on the file.
Monday’s meeting provided a clearer window into that work, especially as it related to the relative costs of the six alternatives evaluated by staff.
Staff’s recommended option for an elevated guideway west of Woodroffe Avenue is the straightest shot from the proposed Knoxdale Station down to the Nepean Sportsplex, though other alternatives could’ve seen back-to-back curves implemented to shift the train above the Woodroffe right-of-way, thereby causing greater traffic disruptions but avoiding the need to demolish any homes.
A series of below-grade options for the LRT along the Woodroffe corridor were previously screened out because of technical complexity and higher associated costs.
But transportation planning director Vivi Chi said Monday that the staff-supported route that would see the demolition of the Manor Village and Cheryl Gardens homes was not the least expensive option on the table in terms of upfront capital costs.
There were only two percentage points of difference between the staff-preferred option and other elevated alternatives, she said.
While the construction costs would be less because of the simpler straight design, what pushed the recommended option’s estimated price up was the consideration of the costs to expropriate the properties from the existing owners, Chi said.
Though the upfront costs for the recommended option might be higher, Chi later clarified in a press conference that staff’s estimates are based solely on capital costs and do not include costs covering maintenance and upkeep.
Staff’s straight-shot option would likely have more affordable operating costs, she said, because it would avoid the “wear and tear” tied to the steel-on-steel grinding seen with any curved alternatives.
Aside from the LRT, the fate of Manor Village is also dependent on the actions of the complex’s new owner, Smart Living Properties.
The Ottawa-based developer and property manager bought Manor Village last month but has yet to publicly disclose its plans for the site.
Smart Living provided a comment to the transportation committee via a written submission from its lawyers on Monday, saying they were “not supportive of an option that would require their client’s land.”
The developer told Global News in a statement Monday after transportation committee that it is focusing on improvements to the existing property while it waits for the LRT plans to formalize.
“We currently intend to renovate and upgrade vacant units as they become available until there is more clarity on the LRT expropriation impact and timeline,” said Rowland Gordon, spokesperson for Smart Living Properties, in an email statement.
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