Elizabeth Desmarais

City of Ottawa

Elizabeth has worked in both the private and the public sector, in both urban and rural settings over the past 29 years. She left the private sector 24 years ago on a two-year contract with the City of Ottawa, wherein she was part of a provincial programme to introduce residential intensification into zoning.  She found her passion working with zoning, having worked previously at Delcan (now Parsons), where she provided recommendations on development proposals for a number of small towns and townships, and during her tenure, re-wrote a number of Comprehensive Zoning By-laws and Official Plans. 
 
While leading the Residential and Heritage Zoning Reviews as part of the former Ottawa Zoning By-law Study, she undertook a lot-by-lot analysis of all residential lots within the former City of Ottawa to determine the existing neighbourhood character of each area, and created Residential zoning subzones based on existing uses, actual lot areas, lot widths, yard setbacks and heights in the 1998 former Ottawa Comprehensive Zoning By-law 93-98.  She balanced the varying objectives of intensification, neighbourhood character, and existing development rights, recommending a number of zoning strategies, including the introduction of higher density uses, such as retirement homes and rooming houses into the low density Residential zones, by restricting the use to being created solely through conversion of existing dwellings.  Purpose-built group-living type housing was introduced in the higher density Residential and Mixed Use zones.  New conversion regulations were created. This 1998 zoning approach was successful in increasing the amount of opportunities for intensification in the lower-density zones and was carried forward into the current Ottawa Zoning By-law.  Her suggestion that neighbourhood subzones also include parking patterns was considered too risky in 1996 and she had to wait until 2013 to consider how to link zoning to neighbourhood character at a more detailed level than the subzones had given, resulting in the Mature Neighbourhoods By-law, enacted by the Ontario Municipal Board in June 2015 (see http://www.omb.gov.on.ca/e-decisions/pl120666-may-26-2015.pdf)
 
 
She currently works in Zoning, Intensification and Neighbourhoods for the City of Ottawa undertaking studies on wide-ranging issues and trends, including waste processing and transfer facilities, homeless shelters, creative and performance venues, makerspaces, kennels, use of place of worship parking lots by complementary off-site uses, industrial zones, rooming houses, secondary dwelling units, and the zoning implementation of Official Plan density requirements.
 
Beth is excited to share her longstanding passion for zoning, and the ground-breaking Streetscape Character Analysis that requires developers to document the character of four land use attributes that affect the look along a street.  Documenting upwards of 21 lots determines the dominant character of these attributes, and must be approved prior to any new development, redevelopment or additions being permitted within the older inner-urban neighbourhoods of Ottawa.  For more information, and to view the SCA Manual and Form, please visit ottawa.ca/StreetscapeCharacter. Beth may be reached at Elizabeth.Desmarais@ottawa.ca, or on Twitter @beth_desmarais.

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