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Make the city buy and preserve heritage-designated buildings | Opinion

Mohammed Adam: Once an private owner's building is designated heritage, the city dictates what can or can’t be done. But it takes no responsibility for the costs.

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Ottawa city councillors do not need more power to deal with decrepit heritage-designated buildings, as some are demanding. Instead, what the city needs to do is rethink its entire heritage preservation policy, which basically saddles property owners with thousands of dollars in repair and restoration costs that often lead to buildings being left vacant and derelict.

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Part of the reason heritage-designated buildings often fall apart is that rehabilitation costs are so prohibitive. Owners who don’t have the money just leave them to decay.

Here’s what the city should do: If a building is historically valuable enough to warrant a heritage designation, the city should buy and preserve it. Or contribute significantly to its rehabilitation or restoration — not the pittance heritage grants provide. City staff and the built heritage committee should not go around slapping heritage designations on buildings, and then walk away, leaving individual or institutional owners to face huge financial consequences.

Don’t get me wrong, heritage is important and worth preserving because it speaks to our history, culture, and how far we’ve come as a city, as a people or as a nation. But, if the government is going to classify buildings as heritage for the good of all of us, private owners should not be made to bear the burden. That’s government responsibility. It must put its money where its mouth is. Most of the property owners don’t want the designation anyway, because it could bankrupt them. Once a building is designated heritage, the owner loses control to the city, which dictates what can or can’t be done, and how it is done. But the city takes no responsibility for the costs. Besides, a heritage designation is a red flag that scares away prospective buyers who worry about not just the downstream rehabilitation costs, but the complex planning hurdles they may have to overcome to convert a heritage building into say, housing. It is why you often see churches for instance, vigorously opposing heritage designations on vacant places of worship.

In 2024, the pastor of an old Baptist church on King Edward Avenue, objected to a heritage designation, fearing it would cause significant financial losses. The pastor, Guy Pierre-Canel explained that the church was hoping to sell the property for $2-3 million, but a real estate agent warned it would have basically no value if designated heritage. He pleaded with the city to not do it. “We are here to say to the city in clear terms that this designation has a $2 million impact for us, which is unbearable,” he told the heritage committee at the time. The committee went ahead regardless. The following year, the archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall opposed heritage designations for two Catholic churches in Orleans and Hintonburg, citing the cost of renovations, among other things.

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And then there are individual developers like Brian Dagenais. He bought three dilapidated heritage houses in Lowertown in 2019, hoping to redevelop the 13 rental units into 24 units. In a city that has a housing crisis, and particularly in a neighbourhood where people desperately need decent housing, you’d think Dagenais would be welcomed with open arms. Not this city. Instead, they put the developer through the planning meat grinder, and six years on, the crumbling property remains the eyesore it has always been. What the city requires of him, he says, will cost him “hundreds of thousands of dollars” he can’t afford. So, the houses “just sit there as monuments — million-dollar monuments — and the private citizen bears all the costs and all the risk, and all the liability to preserve things that generate no value,” he lamented.

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Heritage designations are supposed to tell our stories and help younger generations learn and appreciate the past. When we designate a building heritage, it must not just sit there like an orphan, a monument to nothing. Such buildings must become active places that tell stories about our history and culture.

I am sure that, just like me, many of you have walked past heritage buildings in Ottawa without knowing it. Our heritage buildings often sit in anonymity, and nothing about them tells us how important they are, or what they represent in our history. If we are going to celebrate heritage, let’s do it with purpose.

The city no doubt has a problem managing heritage buildings, and there is a lot to fix and reimagine. But the solution lies in rethinking and adapting policy, not handing more power to councillors.

Mohammed Adam is an Ottawa journalist and commentator. Reach him at nylamiles48@gmail.com

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