Land use · Ottawa
One Ottawa site in ten is mixed use, and it carries a quarter of the city's homes
Sort the register by what is actually being built and four categories come out. Residential is most of the files. Mixed use is nine per cent of the sites and 11,210 of the homes.
Ottawa's register does not have a "what is this" column. It has an application type — rezoning, site plan, subdivision — which tells you what permission is being asked for and nothing at all about what gets built.
So we read the descriptions and sorted the 333 live sites into four categories. The result is the most lopsided table we have produced from this register.
The four categories
| Sites | Share of sites | Homes | Share of homes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | 213 | 64.0% | 31,307 | 68.8% |
| Commercial | 60 | 18.0% | 3,003 | 6.6% |
| Mixed use | 31 | 9.3% | 11,210 | 24.6% |
| Institutional | 29 | 8.7% | 0 | 0.0% |
Two rows of that table are worth stopping on.
Mixed use is 9.3% of the sites and 24.6% of the homes. Thirty-one sites are carrying eleven thousand homes. That is roughly 362 homes each, against 147 on the average residential site — a mixed-use application in Ottawa is, on average, a building nearly two and a half times the size.
Institutional is 8.7% of the sites and zero homes. Twenty-nine live applications — schools, places of worship, care, public works — that produce no housing at all. They are a tenth of the city's live development workload and they are invisible in every housing number published about this city, including ours until this piece.
Why mixed use is where the homes are
It is not a preference. It is a consequence of where the zoning allows height, which we have written about separately: the zones that permit apartments are a small share of the city's land, and almost all of them are on arterial and mainstreet frontage.
Frontage that permits an apartment almost always also permits — and in practice expects — shops at grade. So the same by-law that puts the tall building on a mainstreet puts a commercial unit under it, and the application arrives classified as mixed use. The category is mostly an artefact of where Ottawa lets you build at density rather than a distinct kind of developer.
Which means the twenty-five per cent is fragile in a specific way: it is concentrated on a small number of corridors, and a policy change on any of them moves it.
Why commercial is the reverse
Sixty sites — nearly a fifth of the register — produce 6.6% of the homes. These are the drive-throughs, the fuel stations, the industrial and retail buildings, the self-storage. Suncor Energy Products Partnership alone has four live files.
They matter here for one reason: they are in every count of "development applications" you will read about Ottawa, and they are not housing. Any figure quoted as the city's pipeline that has not separated them is a fifth too generous on the file count.
Where this classification can be wrong
The classifier reads the application's own description. That has two consequences worth stating.
A description that does not mention shops is read as residential, even where the ground floor turns out to be commercial. So the mixed-use share is a floor, not a ceiling — the true number is somewhat higher than 9.3%.
A site is classified once, by the file carrying its homes. A site with a residential rezoning and a separate commercial site plan resolves to one category, and which one depends on where the unit count sits. Thirty-one sites is a small enough number that a handful of judgement calls move the share by a point.
Neither of those is fixable from the register alone. Both would be fixed by reading the actual drawings, which is the next thing we are pointing a machine at.