Author: QTNca

Green Space: A QTN Priority

by Caroline Béland-Pelletier, Chair of the QTNca Natural Environment Committee

Caroline has been a QTNca board member for 3 years and has chaired the Natural Environment Committee for two years

From surveys and conversations we know that QTN residents value the green space that we have in our neighborhood. Some report that it was a major factor in their decision to move into QTN. Residents enjoy the parks and forested trails. I also hear praise for our neighborhood’s tree canopy from visitors who come into QTN.

Neighbourhoods with trees and natural areas such as ours promote physical activity which benefits health and well-being. Many of us go for regular walks through QTN. We are fortunate to have natural areas near our doorsteps. It makes us feel good to spend time around trees. Trees are also our ally for climate change adaptation. They moderate temperature, provide shade to help us through the heat waves, provide natural protection against UV rays and can lower the AC bills.

We know we have a good thing in QTN. We cannot take it for granted. The ash borer, one stress factor for our trees, has resulted in the loss of many trees. We’ve also had two seasons of heavy spongy moth infestation, trees dying of old age, and trees and green space being lost in in-fill projects.

QTNca has sponsored projects to help residents minimize the impact of the spongy moth and we have requested tree planting in the forests and parks to replace the trees taken down due to old age or ash borer illness. We advocated for improvements in the tree protection by-law and policies that require green space and soft landscaping surrounding new infill. We promote the inclusion of trees in front-yard spaces in order to maintain a healthy tree canopy throughout QTN. We ran a Canopy Regeneration Project to invite people to plant trees on their properties, to make use of the City tree-in-trust program, and to reach out to us with ideas of where we could add more trees.

For the future, I would like to emphasize that trees and green space have to be an integral part of urban planning. In my opinion, they are the most important part because without nature we are nothing; we won’t exist. It takes a couple of hours to take down a mature tree and all the benefits I mentioned previously. It will take decades to bring that level of canopy back. If, on top of that, we don’t plan for proper green space for trees to grow, we might see a much greyer, asphalt, concrete, plastic-siding looking neighbourhood in decades to come. It is possible to combine redevelopment and greening strategies but it has to be well-planned in advance and not left as an afterthought.

Getting around QTN

by Lija Bickis, Co-Chair, Safe Streets and Active Transportation Committee.

Lija Bickis. secretary and long-time board member of QTNca, has lead on various sidewalk and traffic safety initiatives for QTNca. She also serves on the community advisory group for the Lincoln Fields Secondary Plan process, along with Kathy Vandergrift.

The neighbourhood is undergoing a significant transformation. In the 10 years that I have been living here, I have watched as the population has shifted to become a neighbourhood with many young families. There are more parents and kids on the street walking, biking, or playing. The increase in families is related to the increase in the number of dwellings, as older bungalows have been replaced with semi-detached units.

It is difficult to split discussion of intensification between housing and transportation impacts. I will talk about the streets. And I say streets on purpose, as QTN has very few sidewalks. At the time our neighbourhood was laid out, cars were fewer in number and also smaller and slower. Walking or rolling in QTN can be stressful, as most streets have no delineation between parking/driving/active users. Moving around with kids can be extra stressful, as they are unpredictable. Drivers can also be unpredictable – anyone in QTN will know the effects of swerving for a squirrel!

City budgets for sidewalks in neighborhoods dealing with in-fill are very far below the demand – essentially a neighborhood can get one if it is attached to another project (sewer rehab, LRT, etc). In a recent example of advocacy from QTNCA, a board member noticed a house for sale in the approximate area that the City had targeted for a pathway to Queensview station. With some quick work from our councillor and city staff, the property was acquired for the future connection. However, there won’t be a sidewalk between Severn school and the pathway, as that one house-long piece of sidewalk isn’t in anyone’s budget. As in many things related to transportation in Ottawa, the work is piecemeal.

As another example, the new, 30 km/h zone speed limits are one area where the City has made steps to improve safety, but they only deliver signs – there is no official enforcement, nor a significant increase in the traffic calming budget. Councillors have a relatively small budget to use for requests from across the ward.

Beyond the issues on QTN streets, there is the bigger picture question of travel across the city. Getting in and out of QTN can be a challenge, with the barriers of the transitway and the Queensway. Turning left out of QTN onto Pinecrest is difficult during much of the day, and there are large stretches without safe crossings for people who walk or roll. Carling also has significant barriers to the flow of people in and out of our neighbourhood, with only two signalized intersections to cross. QTN residents who walk or roll are lucky to be close to the NCC’s pathway network, but that lacks connections to local destinations such as the Lincoln Fields Metro, or the Carlingwood library. And the key pedestrian connection between QTN and Whitehaven has been demolished with a very inadequate plan for replacing it, forcing hundreds of students to detour up to Carling Avenue.

As QTNCA, ‘getting around’ is one of our key issues for the neighbourhood. There is a lot of room for the City to make improvements for everyone in QTN, regardless of the mode(s) we use to get around.

Intensification that works for QTN

by Dan Monafu, a member of the QTNca Planning Committee.

What do we mean by a livable community? Or by a neighbourhood that is people-centric? These are concepts that get at the same thing: that neighbourhoods are places where people live, and we should take that into account when we have the (rare) opportunity to re-think them.

The new O-Train stations and the Lincoln Fields and QTN secondary plans do give us this rare opportunity. And I know that with them, intensification will happen. But what are the things we can do to ensure that it works for us?

Some folks have started to create community asset maps, which list all the publicly-available treasures a neigbourhood has, as a means of making people aware of what’s in front of their eyes and valuable.

Can you think of any such places for QTN? We could list this church, which allows us to have community meetings in large numbers, when we need to gather together. Frank Ryan park, of course, is another example.

If you go down the list of things our neighours wish for, they are not complicated asks: they are things like a small neighbourhood grocery store, so that we are not in a food desert when we run out of milk and it’s late at night.

For others, community is as simple as a coffee shop that they can work from, when they’re tired of tele-working from their basement and need to go somewhere new. This is what some folks call a third space, defined as not home and not work, but an alternate place where people can meet, discuss ideas, or share experiences.

These are the types of things that will likely come through intensification — hopefully the increases in resident count can create enough financial incentive for local coffee shop chains like Little Victories or Equator to open locations here.

But there’s a good way to do things, and a not so good way to do things. For example, would putting a typical convenience store – which doesn’t have fresh fruit or fresh produce … would that solve the food desert problem?

Or would opening a sterile Starbucks franchise mean we’ve created a sense of community? I think there must be compromises made. The purists would say only businesses that meet certain criteria should do; others might say any business is good business since it sparks further economic activity.

The truth is likely somewhere in the middle — perhaps if a Starbucks does open on Queensview and is successful, people will get used to hanging out on that street and in a few years an independent coffee house will say: ‘you know what, that Starbucks proves there’s enough business for us to also be successful here’.

There are also things we can do through partnerships. I was excited to hear about the new curling club coming to QTN. What would it look like for them to partner with our neighbourhood association and offer a cheaper neighbourhood rate, to ensure people here take advantage of what that group does, even if perhaps curling was not our first choice sport we’d think to try.

Having it close by means it becomes an asset to us here, and so we should encourage it to thrive so that it starts to think of ways it could give back even more to our community.

We should also recognize that there are limits to growth. The impacts of climate change show us clearly that the earth has already reached its carrying capacity, so as much as possible we have to learn to reduce, reuse and recycle what already exists – degrowth should always be present and recognized as an important consideration.

As we’re learning, unlimited growth only exists in theoretical models. We live on planet earth and just as we as a people are not limitless or ageless, we need to accept and work with what we were given, something permaculture practitioners would tell us.

But intensification could also mean infills built with aging in place principles, or with intergenerational intentionality between units, not just 4plexes that maximize efficiency of space and have a unidimensional utilitarianism to them. Hopefully some zoning principles can be baked in with the right incentives so that developers veer in these directions – I think of social procurement principles that city council could advocate for and generalize city wide.

Finally, I’d like to encourage us to think creatively about solutions, given the public assets we have in QTN. Things like the municipally-owned bus barn — when the OTrain Phase 2 is live and we have less need for buses, could it be turned into mixed income housing? Or a community centre with a small public library and an arts studio space where community groups could perform? Those are the tangible and intangible assets that slowly make a neighbourhood more livable.