Urgent investment needed to increase affordable housing supply: Ottawa mayor – Ottawa Citizen

Urgent investment from all three levels of government is needed to increase Ottawa’s supply of affordable housing, and to help homeless and disabled people find permanent homes that meet their needs, Mayor Jim Watson says.

The memo, signed by Watson and Councillors Jenna Sudds and Catherine McKenney, was issued late Tuesday on the eve of a debate about whether to declare a city-wide emergency on affordable housing and homelessness.

The memo reviews the city’s six year-old plan to address housing and homelessness and calls for a dramatic “refresh” of that strategy.

In the next 10 years, it suggests, the city should create between 5,700 and 8,500 affordable housing units and financial subsidies, while also ensuring that 20 per cent of those are devoted to supportive and accessible housing. It also calls on the city to preserve its existing stock of Ottawa Community Housing units.

The proposal sets out some ambitious goals: to reduce overall homelessness by 25 per cent and to eliminate “unsheltered” homelessness — people living on the streets.

“The refreshed plan is aspirational in nature and requires the commitment of significant new funding from all levels of government in order to be realized,” the memo says. “Without an injection of increased, sustained and long-term funding, the plan will not achieve its ambitious outcomes.”

The city will spend $109 million on housing and homelessness this year, which means the cost of the refreshed plan cannot be absorbed by municipal property taxpayers alone, Watson said. In the past two budgets, the city has committed $30 million in capital for new affordable housing developments.

The province will contribute $43 million and the federal government $27 million to affordable housing and homelessness initiatives in Ottawa in 2020.

Last month, McKenney put colleagues on notice that she will ask for their support to declare an emergency on affordable housing and homelessness. Council is to debate her motion Wednesday.

The city’s housing crisis has been created by a welter of issues, according to a review of the city’s 2014 housing and homelessness plan.

Funding for new affordable housing units has not kept pace with the city’s population growth that has forced Ottawa’s overall vacancy rate down to 1.8 per cent. That supply shortage has driven up prices: the average market rent in 2018 was $1,174 — a 15 per cent increase from 2014.

That means more people in community housing are holding onto their units longer, reducing the annual turnover. The centralized wait list for community housing has more than 10,600 households on it. Families can wait years for a spot, and some are spending longer periods in emergency shelters.

The lack of affordable housing has exacerbated the city’s homelessness problem. During the past six years, there has been a 23 per cent increase in the number of people requesting an emergency shelter placement. In 2018, the emergency shelter system operated, on average, at 108 per cent of its capacity.

Family homelessness, the report said, is the main driver of the increased demand at the city’s emergency shelters, and the reason why Ottawa increasingly is relying on hotels and motels to house the overflow.

More than 55,000 households in Ottawa — about 13 per cent of the population —  live with the kind of low incomes that make housing a serious challenge. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation says Canadians should be spending no more than 30 per cent of their before-tax income on housing.

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