A transformational shift in city zoning rules has taken another step forward, but some councillors worry people won’t pay attention until it starts upending the look of their neighbourhoods.
The second draft of a massive rewrite of Ottawa’s comprehensive zoning bylaw went through council’s planning and housing committee on Monday, with only minor changes from the first.
It still axes rules that force developers to build a minimum number of parking spaces in new buildings, and only slightly walks back major increases to building heights and housing density in much of the city.
Ruddy said her team is making serious efforts to reach everyone it can, including through social media advertisements, outreach through community associations and open houses that attracted hundreds of people.
An informative/entertaining 8-10 minute video presentation would probably be more effective at getting people up to speed so that they can participate in the conversation.
Wanting it in video form seems pretty weird to me, but if you look at their New Zoning By-law page (which CBC really should’ve linked to if they weren’t too preoccupied with keeping the audience captive) there is in fact a link to a youtube video with some info doled out at a lethargic pace over eleven minutes, mostly about how to get more info from their “interactive map”, and a mind-numbing soundtrack.
I would prefer some kind of executive summary explaining how all this is going to lead to a lot of dense properly city-like mixed residential/commercial construction happening. It doesn’t seem to be a real priority as far as I can see at a glance. The examples in the video are boringly conventional suburban-looking housing with slightly larger allowable building size.
Geeeeze. Agreed that video is super dull. A high level executive summary is what is needed.
There are some really cool multi-story single egress stair construction ideas that are happening in Europe and parts of the States that we could adopt to add to our zone densification, but from what I can tell at a glance our Ontario building code would need to change to adopt them.
