Ken’s Bygone Sandy Hill

A bittersweet reaction to the glowing RE/MAX liveability report

Ken Clavette

This summer Sandy Hill residents, both current and past, had mixed reactions when RE/MAX announced that our community was one of the 10 best neighbourhoods to live in Canada. Their report —The Best Places to Live in Canada 2024 (blog.remax.ca/best-places-to-live-in-canada) —looked at neighbourhood qualities that “…. resonate most with Canadians and determine the best neighbourhoods,” they said.

We had common agreement on many of the criteria that they used. We are all fortunate to benefit from the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, and parks. Our inner-city location makes proximity to work possible; we can easily walk, cycle, and have transit access even when the OTrain is not running. Thanks largely to Strathcona Heights, we are home to people from diverse cultures and ethnicities.

But there were a few of the criteria that I found more questionable. The report included health or medical services. These seem to have been drawn from looking at a map: seeing the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre and the uOttawa-based centre, rather than addressing the real shortfall in availability of finding a family doctor. I have been a member of the Health Centre since it was housed in the basement of the Community Centre on Somerset East 40Êyears ago. Despite its growth, there are always waiting lists as it struggles to serve its catchment area, which is much larger than just Sandy Hill. Half the doctors not long ago decamped from the uOttawa-housed clinic, forcing people to travel out of the community to keep their doctor.

The last two criteria, the listing of schools and childcare, seem to again combine map reading and a lack of understanding of true availability. There have been recent positive advances in the funding of childcare in Canada, but still there are challenges in finding available spaces. Currently the future home of the Garderie Bernadette Centre at the university is in question. There are plans by uOttawa to demolish the building that houses the centre and little willingness to help address the centre’s future. As for schools, we are fortunate to have two primary schools, one French and one English, but long gone are the days when we had at least five schools to choose from. Now children must leave after grade six, attending schools in neighbouring communities, often bussing or long walks.

What was more troubling about the report was that it seemed glib when not addressing or defining what a community is.

I enjoy reading the Facebook page Growing Up in Sandy Hill and the memories shared about childhood lived here many years ago. Of course I would, you could say; after all I write a column called Bygone Sandy Hill. To be “bygone” means that things have had to change.

As I read the descriptions of growing up in Sandy Hill, I was reminded that through the decades what is/was the Sandy Hill community has changed. Those growing up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived in a different Sandy Hill. The local convenience stores were all family owned and often the owners lived above their shop.

We had an IGA on Osgoode, also family operated. When I got here, the IGA name was gone but the owner was in the store. Walking in to buy something often resulted in a 20-minute conversation.

When I arrived here, there were neighbours still living in homes they grew up in. I learnt a lot from them about the “bygone days” that have fuelled this column. Our landlord lived on the ground floor. Her husband’s family built the house in 1898, continually living here through three generations. Many of the homes were owner-occupied even if they rented an apartment in their home. Those things have changed drastically on my street over the past 40 years.

When my partner and I arrived in 1981, we could afford to rent on our street. Thirty years ago, we could afford to buy, even though it meant a financial struggle. Those days are gone. My home has no value, it is the land that has value, and not to serve a wider community.

The street and the community I moved into are not the same anymore. The RE/MAX survey got a lot of Sandy Hill right, but it had no criteria to measure what makes a good community. It is easy to look at a map, to study property values, but much harder to measure what it takes to make a livable neighbourhood. A place where children and families can live, where we have neighbours that live on the street longer than 8 months of the year. I wonder how much more it has to change in my coming years: when the daycare centre is gone, when the co-op housing is gone, when the only people living on my street are aged 17-21. When the likes of me are “bygone”?