Proposed U of O residence unfair intrusion into Sandy Hill, community association says
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN March 18, 2014
OTTAWA — Building a new residence on a neighbourhood street in Sandy Hill is a poor solution to the University of Ottawa’s shortage of student beds, the local community association says.
“It says dorm. It doesn’t say even, ‘We’ve made an effort to make it blend in’,” said Chad Rollins, vice-president of Action Sandy Hill, of the university’s latest proposal for a four-storey, 172-bed residence on Henderson Avenue at Templeton Street, just behind its new “advanced research complex” on King Edward.
Sandy Hill residents have insisted that the University of Ottawa needs to house more students on campus, but Rollins said putting a building on Henderson, on the very edge of the university’s property and facing private homes, is cheating.
“It depends on what your definition of campus is. Is something campus as soon as the university buys it?” he asked.
The U of O is bulldozing its way east into Sandy Hill and, in Rollins’s take, violating a compromise from 2007 that made King Edward and the buildings on its east side the eastern edge of the campus. Everyone understood that meant tall buildings to the west, he said.
“They’re going to upscale many of their buildings over the year,” he said. “That’s fine. It’s going to happen, and that would be appropriate places for it.”
The councillor for the area, Mathieu Fleury, is more kindly disposed to the plans, which he sees as the best of a lot of undesirable options.
“They’ve been slow to build, but once they’re built, we have zero issues,” he said of the university’s existing residences. “They have a good track record of being responsive and being able to manage their properties.
Fleury has some quibbles with the design of the building — its southern wall is plain brick, for instance, and there doesn’t seem to be enough room for mass move-ins and move-outs at either end of the school year — but overall he’s pleased the university is proposing a substantial building that doesn’t need a rezoning.
The new residence would only take a little pressure off the Sandy Hill apartment market: it’s less than half the size of a private student-oriented building at Laurier Avenue and Friel Street that’s winding through development approvals, and others are in the works. The student population at the University of Ottawa has grown by thousands over the past decade, and even if many students don’t want to live in official student housing, residence space hasn’t kept up with demand.
Since the proposal is within the property’s current zoning, the university will likely get approval from city officials without the need for a council vote.
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