Adam: So much for the promise of affordable housing near Ottawa transit stations

City policy says 20 per cent of new residential development should be affordable. There is clearly a big gap between policy and practice.

Published Dec 07, 2023 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 3 minute read

Building homes around rapid transit corridors is recommended by experts. Photo by Errol McGihon /Postmedia

Many experts have long argued that building homes around rapid transit corridors not only boosts ridership, but is necessary to meet housing demand in cities across Canada. Indeed, in a recent report, the Canadian Urban Transit Association argues that, today, there is a mismatch between planning for housing and planning for transit. If they were integrated, it says, housing would receive a significant boost.

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Integrating planning for housing and transit would require new thinking, but for now, under what’s known as Transit Oriented Development (TOD), cities such as Ottawa have pursued policies that encourage housing around transit stations. The policies have essentially gone under the radar, but with the housing crunch, they are now under more scrutiny.

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Ottawa approved a TOD policy in 2012, and now has six such specially-designated transit locations: Lees, Hurdman, Tremblay, St. Laurent, Cyrville, and Blair, all of which have hundreds of hectares for development. The idea is to increase density around transit stations so more people can live, work and play in their neighbourhoods.

So, how has Ottawa done in the last decade? Has the city walked the talk?

The city tracks housing development through building permits, and according to its data, 17,264 permits were issued to developers to build homes near rapid-transit stations across the city, not just in TOD locations, between 2013 and 2021, the last year for which figures are available. It is worth noting however, that of the more than 17,000 units built, only 554, or about 3.2 per cent, are affordable. Considering that city policy requires 20 per cent of all new residential development to be affordable, there is a big gap between policy and practice.

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According to Royce Fu, the city’s manager of policy planning, the affordable housing figure only covers projects that received city funding. He says units that were funded through other sources are not included. And those built through private transactions are not tracked, so it is hard to put a figure on them. “The percentage of affordable housing built around transit stations is not comparable to the city-wide target as they are in different areas,” Fu said in an email.

Yes, more affordable housing may be built in other places, but even so, the number of homes funded by the city — 554 out of 17,000 — seems like a drop in the ocean given the constant drumbeat on the subject. It prompts the question: Why is Ottawa so far behind its own stated goals?

The figures suggest that most of what is being built is at market prices, which may be beyond the means of low- and middle-income residents, most of whom rely on rapid transit to get around. Housing built around transit corridors over the last eight years or so represents 25 per cent of overall urban growth, which, on its face, looks promising. But if those who need such homes can’t afford them, it raises questions about the city’s commitment to affordable housing.

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If the city won’t build them on land it owns, such as Lansdowne Park, and they are not readily available near transit corridors, where are those who need the housing going to find it?

Of course, the city is not a builder, and only makes policy to encourage developers to build. The city acknowledges that residential construction expenses in Ottawa have jumped about 51 per cent since 2019, so cost matters for builders. Still, in Ottawa, where 10,000 households are on wait lists for subsidized housing, with wait times of up to five years, something is amiss if the city’s signature transit-oriented development policy is contributing so little to affordable housing.

One can only hope that with the federal government’s many recent housing policy announcements — including the $4-billion fund to build 100,000 new homes; removal of the GST/HST from rental housing construction; and the $15 billion in rental housing loans — will spur the city and developers to build more housing, especially of the affordable variety.

Mohammed Adam is an Ottawa journalist and commentator. Reach him at nylamiles48@gmail.com