You might have heard: Claridge wants to build new homes on 112 hectares of land just west of Stittsville. So they’ve applied to the City for an urban boundary expansion.
In this video I explain what’s happening, and stick to the end – I’ll tell you what you can do.
Ontario Planning Policy requires that cities need to have enough residential land supply to accommodate 15 years of projected growth. So every decade or so, cities do a population study and update the planning maps. The last time Ottawa did this was just a few years ago for our Official Plan.
Population data predicted growth from 1-million people to 1.4-million people. We spent 3 years in the last term of council updating the plans, and after a lot of consultation and debate, we expanded the urban boundary and added a bit of new development land, mostly at the edges of the city. We made sure to keep new development land away from sensitive natural areas, and avoid sprawling into good farmland. The land west of Stittsville was NOT approved for expansion.
But then in 2024, the Province changed the rules on us. Instead of waiting for an Official Plan update every decade or so, landowners can now apply at any time to change the urban boundary to develop land. And that’s exactly what developers are doing. In the last year, a bunch of landowners have applied to add land at the edges of the suburbs, all around Ottawa.
City staff and City Council have consistently said “no” to all of these ad-hoc proposals. And I fully expect we’ll say no to this “Stittsville West” proposal as well.
It’s bad planning: This land from Claridge near Stittsville is isolated from the community: Far from transit, far from shops and services, far from schools. It would be expensive to service with water and sewer. And it’s close to sensitive natural areas, including wetland. Not only that, but there’s a ton of land already designated for growth that hasn’t been developed yet. In fact it’s way more than the 15 year land supply that the province requires.
So what can you do?
Write to your MPP, George Darouze, and write to the Premier, Doug Ford. You can tell them to change the urban boundary expansion policy, and before we sprawl out further into farmland and natural areas, we need to get developers building where there’s already land designated for development.
You can also contact the City planner responsible for this file, Colette Gorni, and share your comments about this proposal.
We’re going to keep pushing back against this proposal. Please share this post with a neighbour, and watch for more updates on my web site: glengower.ca/development/