Central Ottawa

4 neighbourhoods in the part of Ottawa that existed before the car. Centretown is the residential half of downtown and the densest square kilometre in the city; the ByWard Market and Lowertown are the blocks Colonel By laid out in 1826, and still the only district where the street life outlasts the working day; Sandy Hill holds the University of Ottawa and, on the streets around it, most of the city's embassies; the Glebe is Bank Street between the canal and Dow's Lake, the one inner-city high street that never lost its independent shops.

This is where Line 1 actually behaves like a subway — underground from Rideau to Pimisi — and it is the only part of Ottawa where not owning a car is a normal choice rather than an eccentric one. Three things to check before you commit: whether the building is pre-1960, because the older stock is where the knob-and-tube and the galvanized plumbing are; whether it sits in a heritage conservation district, several of which run through these blocks and constrain what you may do to a façade; and, for anything near the canal or the Rideau, the overland-water endorsement, which the 2017 and 2019 floods made both more expensive and harder to get.