Pellerin: Maybe the City of Ottawa is doing heritage all wrong

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It’s weird that we insist on holding on to derelict properties in the name of conservation while allowing delinquent owners to neglect their buildings until they fall down. It’s like we’re doing heritage upside-down, and allowing our city to become uglier and less inviting in the process. We really oughtn’t.

This week, the Citizen is reporting the story of a man who bought three rental properties in Lowertown that he can’t renovate because they’re too dilapidated, or tear down because they’re in a heritage conservation district. They are not themselves heritage buildings. They’re old, but not historically significant.

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The 19th-century buildings were repeatedly modified over time and frankly, judging by photos of them, it’s hard to imagine those changes were made with heritage or safety concerns in mind.

The owner says he wants to work with the city to ensure that what gets built in their place contributes to the historic character of the community. And for sure we can have rules about what buildings look like in historic neighbourhoods. In an ideal world, buildings in heritage districts would be maintained properly and consistently over time. But given the state those three are in, wouldn’t it make more sense to replace them with something new but historic-looking that would make the area more beautiful?

Nobody wants to just trash important historical buildings, but at the same time, not everything that’s old needs to be kept. “Tradition,” the writer Eliot Schrefer said, “is peer pressure from dead people.” We, the humans of 2024, have needs and priorities that are as valid as those of 19th-century Ottawans. We don’t need to be bullied by ghosts.

Or negligent owners. Everywhere across the city we have properties that are basically abandoned by their owners. I live next door to one, now home to a thriving population of raccoons. People on my street are sick and tired of it. By my count we’re on the third owner in three years, yet nothing is done to make it less of an eyesore.

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That’s a problem Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stephanie Plante is hoping to do something about. On Thursday she tabled a proposal at the emergency preparedness committee to create a “problematic properties” website, kind of like what Edmonton is doing.

Plante has been working on this for about a year, she tells me. Which is about the same time it can take to put up a fence around a dangerous property. There’s a process, and owners can drag things out with appeals. “It can be really stressful on neighbours,” she says. “It affects their sense of security, of safety.”

The difficulty is that the city does not have the tools necessary to manage this issue. The province does. In Edmonton, the problematic buildings initiative includes representatives of the provincial government so they can actually get things done to remedy urgent and dangerous situations. We need that here.

“The thing I’m hearing the most,” Plante says, “is ‘why can’t bylaw do more?’ Why is it taking so long to get a fence up and board windows? We need better tools to manage existing rules.”

She’s right and while I support this initiative, I want more and better. Last weekend I took my eldest and her cousin to Quebec City for a soupçon of French culture to conclude their March break. I gave them a brief tour of the old city and essentially left them to explore on their own. If you’ve visited Vieux-Québec, you’ll agree with the kids that it’s both historic and jaw-droppingly beautiful.

Quebec City as a whole isn’t perfect and it has its share of negligent owners. The municipal government started cracking down on them nearly two years ago and beefed up its built-heritage policy, too.

Ottawa will never be as pretty as Quebec City but it should be as beautiful as it’s capable of being. We can start right now.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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