In the ongoing conversation about how to solve Ottawa’s housing and transportation crises, a single solution is often presented as a silver bullet. As presented, Transit-Oriented Development, or TOD is supposed to solve many if not all of our city’s issues. On the surface, the concept is undeniably appealing. It proposes that we concentrate new growth into dense, walkable communities clustered around our shiny new multi-billion-dollar light rail transit stations.
For politicians, it’s a simple and marketable vision; for residents, it seems like a logical way to get the most out of our massive transit investment. Building more homes for more people near high-quality transit is, in isolation, a positive thing. It gives more people a practical lifestyle option to rely less on a personal household vehicle and can create vibrant, active hubs. But I believe this narrow focus on a few high-density nodes is a trap, and I’d like to discuss why. By putting all our eggs in the TOD basket, we are preserving and further entrenching ourselves in the very car-dependent, financially unproductive development pattern that is bankrupting our city everywhere else.
“Quarantining” Good Urbanism
The primary flaw in a TOD-centric strategy is that it treats good urbanism as something to be used sparingly, and contained within a handful of special, designated zones. It creates a two-tiered city: a handful of dense, active transit hubs, and a vast, unchanging landscape of car-dependent, low-density suburbia that is effectively exempted from participating in the city’s evolution. This approach sends a subtle but powerful message to the vast majority of the city’s residents: “Don’t worry, the change isn’t coming for your neighbourhood. All the new people and buildings will go over there, by the train station.”
This is antithetical to the way healthy communities have been built for centuries. It prevents the gradual, organic evolution of our neighbourhoods by the limiting the next increment of development almost everywhere. Instead of allowing a corner store to emerge on a residential street or incentivizing replacing a single-family home with a duplex or triplex, the TOD model we’re leaning on insists that all meaningful change must be concentrated in a few pre-approved locations. This approach not only fails to address the systemic issues plaguing the rest of the city but also generates intense political conflict by forcing a huge amount of development into a very small area, guaranteeing a backlash from nearby residents. It lets the status quo off the hook, ensuring that for most of the city, car dependency remains the only viable option.
The Fiscal Sustainability Failure
From a financial perspective, the TOD model is a dangerously inadequate response to the fiscal crisis our city faces. The core of our problem, as articulated by the Strong Towns movement, is that the vast majority of our post-war suburban development pattern is financially insolvent. The low-density, sprawling layout does not generate enough property tax revenue to cover the enormous long-term costs of maintaining the vast, dispersed infrastructure required to service it. This is the essence of the issue with the “growth pays for growth” scheme: we use the short-term revenues from new growth to pay for the promises of the past, all while taking on massive future liabilities we have no realistic plan to pay for.
To understand the scale of this problem, we can use the lens of “land use efficiency”—a measure of how much tax revenue a piece of land generates per hectare. When you apply this to Orléans, the picture is stark. A commercial artery like St. Joseph Boulevard, with its single-story buildings and vast, underutilized parking lots, has an incredibly low level of financial productivity compared to a traditional, dense main street.
The TOD model attempts to solve this by creating small islands of extremely high land use efficiency around transit stations. But it’s a few drops in a really large bucket. The immense wealth generated in these tiny pockets will never be able to on its own subsidize the worsening, multi-generational financial liability of the rest of the sprawling, unproductive city. Even if every TOD project is a wild success, it’s like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teaspoon. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem with the suburban development pattern itself. The city’s long-term financial health will not be secured by a few dozen well-designed towers; it will be secured by ensuring that every neighbourhood is contributing productively to the city’s bottom line.
A Better Way: Good Urbanism Everywhere
The alternative to the Transit-Oriented Development trap is not to oppose density, but to distribute it. Instead of restricting ourselves to hyper-concentrating growth in a few select areas, we should legalize a broader definition of development (mixed-use) in every neighbourhood. This is the essence of building a truly strong town.
This approach starts with a comprehensive, city-wide reform of our zoning by-laws. We must eliminate the most restrictive residential zones (like N1 and N2 in the new proposed bylaws) that needlessly limit what can be built to replace our current monoculture crop of single-family homes in the suburbs. By establishing a more permissive baseline, we can legalize gentle density by default, incentivizing the construction of more duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings throughout the city. We must also integrate permissions for low-impact, neighbourhood-serving commercial uses directly into residential zones, allowing the natural emergence of walkable, 15-minute communities where residents can meet their daily needs without a car. TOD communities with walkable amenities and services are great, but almost all suburban residents are still going to drive there if development is limited to the area around transit stations.
This bottom-up, incremental approach is far more resilient and financially sustainable. It allows all neighbourhoods to evolve, adapt, and increase their tax productivity over time. It disperses the responsibility for accommodating growth across the entire city, reducing political conflict and allowing for more context-sensitive development. This is how you build a city that is financially solvent and full of great, unique places, not a city with a few great pockets of walkability around transit stations surrounded by vast swaths of unproductive sprawl.
While TOD can and should be a part of the solution, it is a sleight-of-hand distraction from defenders of the unsustainable status quo if it is presented as the only solution. It is a top-down, master-planned approach that fails to address the systemic issues at the heart of our financial and social challenges. The upcoming comprehensive zoning by–law review presents a generational opportunity to choose a better path. It’s time to tell the city that good urbanism, walkability, and intensification are not special features to be quarantined in a few select areas, but the baseline standard that every neighbourhood deserves.
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