State Of The City

Planning update in Hamilton

NRU
Sept. 28, 2016
By Geordie Gordon

Hamilton is bullish on its future, says planning and economic development general manager Jason Thorne. Sparked by increased development interest, new or updated city plans and polices either in process or in place indicate the city is continuing to move in a positive direction.

“For a long time, people always talked about Hamilton [being] on the cusp of something big, and now we’re right smack in the middle of something big. We’re no longer on the cusp. We’re there,” Thorne told NRU.

As evidence of this, the city is updating its downtown secondary plan and including tall building guidelines as a result of an increase in tall building development activity in the core. Th e update to the secondary plan will examine uses, building heights, tall buildings locations and design considerations.

Thorne says that the impetus for the update was increased development activity, particularly with tall buildings. For a long time, the city wasn’t getting much development interest in the lower city. That is now changing.

“Given that we’re seeing more and more interest in tall buildings especially, we wanted to make sure we had some robust guidelines around that,” he said. “We’ve also done recently some work looking at our mobility hubs, and that is also an impetus for starting to look at those policies in the downtown area a little more closely.”

Thorne says that the construction of the new GO station in the North End area of downtown is having an impact on how planning should be done, if it is to take advantage of the new infrastructure, both in the immediate vicinity of the station and in the broader downtown.

The tall building guidelines have been subject to public consultation, and Thorne says the intention is to have them considered by council before the end of the year, at the same time as the updated downtown secondary plan.

Another sign of development and economic interest in the city is reflected in the second phase of work in the industrial Bayfront area, on which the city is just about to embark. It’s an area that has long defined visitors’ image of the city. The city has been working for about a year on the first phase of a strategy for the area.

“This is what people are used to seeing when they go over the [Burlington Bay James N. Allan] Skyway - the real industrial area where the steel plants are and some of the heavy manufacturing uses are. So we’re looking at a strategy for what does the long-term growth of that area look like,” Thorne said.

The city has conducted research and analysis on employment and economic trends to find out what some of the needs are of area businesses. Thorne says the city expects the area to remain a vibrant employment area. The second phase of the study will look at the planning permissions in the area and site plan requirements. It may lead to examining the zoning in the area.

“I think the vision is this is an employment area: it’s going to stay as a very important employment area for the city, and really for the province. But we want it to be a people friendly employment area. It should also be a place that reconnects to the city. For a long time it’s been very disconnected [from] the city … We want to better integrate it with rest of the city and make it a … desirable place for a business to set up,” he said.

The study will help the city understand what sort of employment uses it should plan for, Thorne says. Staff will anticipate the future needs of uses such as advanced manufacturing and agrifood sectors that the area is already starting to accommodate.

“So [the questions is] what do we need to do to better attract those kinds of businesses? It’s an economic development plan, it’s also a land use plan,” Thorne said.

The second phase will include community and business consultations. It will probably be a year or more before recommendations are in front of council.

In another big change for the city, staff is currently conducting public information centres as part of the environmental assessment process for the planned LRT. The sessions are gathering community feedback on corridor design, streetscape elements, station locations and general design work.

An interim control zoning by-law has been in place for the LRT since last October to give the city time to update the zoning and ensure that it is “LRT ready,” Thorne said.

The updated zoning for the LRT corridor will be considered at Planning Committee October 4. This will ensue that the city does not end up with the kinds of uses that it doesn’t want along the LRT corridor, with restrictions on car-oriented uses. The zoning will also establish minimum requirements for height and density.

“We don’t want to lose important development sites along the LRT corridor to single-storey uses which would underutilize the opportunity and the infrastructure.”

Although Thorne didn’t specify the requirements, he said that the intent of the zoning is in part to establish appropriate as-of-right permissions for LRT-oriented development. As such, the zoning will address parking requirements and transit-oriented design standards.

“The idea is to make the corridor development-ready, so when we get the right kind of development coming along, we’d like to be able to, to the extent possible, go right to [the] site
plan [stage].”

The city also continues to harmonize its pre-amalgamation zoning by-laws. This has been done in phases. So far the zoning has been updated for rural, industrial and institutional areas. Next up are mixed-use commercial areas, for which the city has conducted the first phase of consultation. Staff expect to come forward next spring with a recommended city-wide
mixed-use commercial zoning by-law.