Who Belongs in Sandy Hill?
The Downtown Ottawa neighbourhood is undergoing significant change that affects low income residents, students, and Ottawans hoping to get on the property ladder.
Stephanie Thompson; 31 May 2022
The Charlotte condos are under construction on Rideau Street (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
The Charlotte Presentation Centre is an unassuming sight on the streetscape of Rideau Street - a one-storey, trailer-sized building with fancy wooden siding. Inside, however, you can catch a glimpse of the future of Sandy Hill.
Sandy Hill is a neighbourhood in transition. Strolling the tree-lined streets, applicant proposal posters are a common sight dotting the landscape in front of buildings and empty lots. On the City of Ottawa Development Applications Search, there are 58 active applications in the Rideau-Vanier ward - the third highest number of development proposals among Ottawa’s wards.
Just one of the development application posters in Sandy Hill at 360 Friel Street. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
The neighbourhood, part of the Rideau-Vanier ward situated south of Lowertown and west of Vanier, is home to just over 12,000 people. It is a mix of single family homes, embassies, student housing, rooming houses, social housing, and co-op housing. It is a popular up-and-coming neighbourhood due to its proximity to other downtown Ottawa neighbourhoods like the Byward Market and Centretown, and its lower average rent and purchase prices compared to neighbourhoods like Westboro.
I stopped by the Presentation Centre on Rideau Street to chat with a friendly Richcraft sales rep about the currently under-construction Charlotte condos. She was eager to tell me about how condos like The Charlotte are the best way for young professionals to get on the property ladder in a hot market like Ottawa. We both note how different the neighbourhood is becoming as so many construction projects are proposed and break ground. I note that more affordable housing is being demolished for infill housing that seems to cater to a higher-end clientele. She agrees, and notes that the gentrification of the neighbourhood is inevitable, just like Westboro before it. I’m handed a heavy, expensive-looking booklet detailing the specifics of the building and the neighbourhood that surrounds it. The booklet makes Sandy Hill look like a dual income millennial paradise, replete with dining, transportation, and recreation, and makes no mention of the diverse population that surrounds The Charlotte.
The promotional literature from The Charlotte Presentation Centre (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
That diverse neighbourood includes low income individuals relying on social assistance who have lived in the area for decades. One year ago, CBC Ottawa covered the renoviction of longtime rooming house residents on Osgoode Street when their row of properties were purchased by Smart Living Properties. I spoke to Sloane Mulligan (who uses they/them pronouns), an organizer with the Osgoode St. Tenant Committee. In the year since CBC covered the situation, the tenants reached a compromise in which they agreed to move into one of the rooming houses, leaving the others vacant for Smart Living to renovate. In early 2022, Smart Living issued new eviction notices (known as N13s) to the tenants living in the single remaining rooming house on Osgoode Street.
A sticker on a street pole on Laurier Avenue placed by the Osgoode St. Tenant Committee (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
“[The tenants] were, I think, quite gracious in agreeing to move into a new building, for some of them [to] move into a new building in that row of rooming houses.” Mulligan remarked. “They were flexible, they were accommodating. And I think they deserve to, you know, have some good faith from the landlord in allowing them to maintain those tenancies.”
The fate of the remaining Osgoode Street tenants will be decided at an upcoming Landlord Tenant Board hearing.
Click here to view a before & after of some of the Osgoode Street rooming houses in 2014 & 2022.
The last weekend of April is a popular moving day in Sandy Hill, as students finish exams. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
Despite the fact that affordable housing is being demolished or renovicted in favour of housing marketed to students, this new housing isn’t always within reach for the student population. Students who wish to live close to the University of Ottawa by residing in Sandy Hill face significant affordability challenges. Full time students with no dependents receiving OSAP can expect to receive a monthly maximum of $1620 for the 2021-2022 school year, down from $2180 in the 2020-2021 school year.
The full time student population at the University of Ottawa has increased by 33% from 2005 to 2020 to over 37,000 students. Despite the construction of new residences like 45 Mann and the Annex, the University has only 3,482 beds in residence. A space in residence is only guaranteed for full-time first year students and upper year students who have lived in residence for the preceding 12 months. This leaves the majority of students on their own to find housing on the private rental market.
"Unfortunately, the majority of the rooming houses are being renovated currently and, therefore, that represents this pretty enormous loss of affordable housing. It's gone, it'll be renovated, it will be much more expensive, and of course rented out to students."
- Sloane Mulligan, tenant organizer
Back at the presentation centre, the sales rep and I look down the street toward 545 Rideau, a new building marketed toward students and young adults. Unlike The Charlotte, 545 Rideau is comprised of exclusively rental units.
Click to view a before & after of 545 Rideau in 2017 & 2022.
Purpose-built rentals are an important part of the housing landscape in any city. I spoke to Mathieu Fleury, City Councilor for Ward 12 (Rideau-Vanier) about this issue. Councilor Fleury noted that “rental housing that's built every year [is] way too low in overall percentage. [Ottawa is] at under 20%, we're closer to 12% yearly out of all the new housing that's built that are rentals.” Many of these newly built rental units are priced out of reach of neighbourhood residents. A 480 square foot studio apartment at 545 Rideau is priced at $1,425 per month. Another new building, THEO (305 Rideau Street), is explicitly billed as off-campus student housing and starts at $950 per month for shared accommodations.
A screenshot of featured listings at 545 Rideau Street from their website.
"Give cities the maturity to implement the right types of planning policies that protect tenants, that ensures renewal of properties, but that doesn't risk the forcing out of tenants, and then the coming back with elevated brands [of housing]"
- Mathieu Fleury, City Councilor Ward 12 (Rideau-Vanier)
There are other perspectives on housing in the neighbourhood in the form of community groups. Action Sandy Hill is a community organization active in the neighbourhood. They take two positions on housing - that allowing run-down student housing to proliferate denigrates the neighbourhood, but also that new development hurts the character of the neighbourhood through “thoughtless modification, demolition, and incompatible infill” (per a statement on their website.) The implication is that only a certain type of high-end development is welcome in Sandy Hill, as per their list of housing solutions which emphasizes building “attractive, appropriate, high-quality development that contributes to the character and vitality of the neighbourhood.” (Action Sandy Hill was asked to comment on this story and did not respond by publication time.)
127 Osgoode Street, a single family home across the street from the Osgoode Street rooming houses, is up for sale for $919,000. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
The City of Ottawa is in a housing emergency, as officially declared by city council in 2020. The rest of Canada is not faring much better in a housing ecosystem consisting of bidding wars, over-leveraged households, and the disappearance of affordable housing. Canadian cities desperately need infill development, especially densification of downtown neighbourhoods in cities like Ottawa.
Before I left the presentation centre, I asked the Richcraft sales rep where she thought the low income residents of Sandy Hill would go once the neighbourhood gentrified, when rents and property taxes would be out of reach for a student without supplemental income or someone on social assistance. She paused, shrugged, and remarked that hopefully they would find somewhere else to live. Sandy Hill is a microcosm of the broader picture of Canada, in which affordable housing is replaced by luxury condos and lavish houses, leaving people with nowhere to go in their own neighbourhoods.