Push to use public land for public housing comes to Ottawa city hall, where ears are open to ideas to tackle housing crisis
Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Published May 03, 2023 • Last updated 10 hours ago • 6 minute read
A professor of urban planning in Australia for nearly two decades, housing policy consultant Carolyn Whitzman recalled Monday how one state government came to her, wanting significantly more affordable housing — and without having to spend to make it happen.
“I said, ‘Aha! Let me introduce you to land policy’,” said Whitzman. “About six months after the report we did for them got passed, there was modular housing going up on a former road allowance from the state government, and it’s there now and it’s saving lives.”
Whitzman is making much the same pitch in a new report, prepared for the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, and presented at Ottawa city hall this week.
Focused on “scaling up” non-profit housing in Ottawa, the report presents a formula it says city decision-makers can use to create homes that are affordable to people making moderate incomes, and potentially, some with low-incomes.
The key is giving free land to non-profit housing providers, along with other relief like fee waivers and tax exemptions. To demonstrate this, the report presents a number of hypothetical development scenarios – though they do rely on some additional assumptions, such as municipal dollars invested, a lending rate not presently available, in one case, and the need for additional operating dollars for projects involving supportive housing units.
For a city-owned site near the future Lincoln Fields LRT station, Whitzman and her co-authors model a 516-unit development across three imagined buildings.
Thirty per cent of its units would lease at 80 per cent of median market rent: from $800 for a studio to $1,279 for a unit with three or more bedrooms.
The rest of the rents would have to be between $2,210 for a one-bedroom and $3,500 for a three-plus bedroom “to support the mortgage financing necessary for financial viability” for the imagined $276-million project, which considers costs and funding sources.
It does rely on $27.9 million being granted by from the city (which has historically budgeted $15 million a year for such grants), as well as another $8.5 million in waived development charges.
The report states that non-profit housing affordability deepens over time, compared to market housing, as the years pass and landlords operating on a for-profit basis raise rents.
“However, in order to produce deeply affordable rents and adequate supports, the City of Ottawa needs to partner with provincial and federal governments.”
One of the report’s key recommendations is for city to revisit a 2019 report by a city hall staff task force. It identified 20 sites with the potential for affordable housing development in the short, medium, and long term, on public land near O-Train stations.
The Whitzman-Alliance to End Homelessness report, which was sponsored by Toronto-based anti-poverty group Maytree, recommends the city issue requests-for-proposals for all city-owned sites identified in the task force report, by the end of 2023.
One of those sites was at Bayview Yards – 6.6 hectares of city property just west of Bayview Station, and a site reportedly under consideration as a potential location for a new Ottawa Senators arena.
While this parcel was identified by the 2019 task force report as offering a short-term development opportunity, neighbouring federally owned land on the other side of Bayview Station Road, and city-owned property south of Scott and Albert streets (currently home to the Tom Brown arena), were also labelled as possible hosts, in the long-term, for affordable housing.
The Whitzman report proposes that “a large-scale, showcase affordable housing project” be prioritized for the area around Bayview. Between 17 hectares of public and privately-owned land, zoned for up to 30 storeys, the report says up to 12,000 homes could be created “in one mixed-income, mixed-use precinct, including associated social infrastructure and amenities that could serve the whole city.”
The report was presented at council’s planning and housing committee on Wednesday, where staff were asked about the status of the 20 government-owned sites identified in their 2019 report.
Peter Radke, director of the corporate real estate office (CREO), said he hadn’t seen this particular list, but the city does look annually at its own land inventory to see what it can dispose of. He’s been with the city for more than a decade, “and we’re reaching higher and higher up the tree, the low-hanging fruit is gone and now we’re getting ladders to get some of that land that we can surplus and put on the market, or to transfer to housing services.”
A lot of city lands have contamination issues, meaning remediation would be needed before construction, said Radke. Some sites are also being used as staging grounds for the LRT project, added David Wise, the acting director of economic development and long-range planning.
Wise said staff would like to do a more comprehensive review of the 2019 list of properties, and other sites with CREO, “to see which ones might be a little bit more ready to go than some of the others.”
Interim community and social services general manager Clara Freire also noted that from an affordable housing development perspective, “land is not the greatest barrier for us.” It’s capital funding, she said, as well as operating funding in the case of supportive housing.
But it’s not just large, LRT-adjacent sites that Whitzman’s report recommends the city take a look at. It identifies “several hundred parcels of land owned by municipal, federal and provincial governments in all suburbs of Ottawa that are suitable for affordable and supportive housing development.” The report includes a map of such sites, courtesy of another project Whitzman worked on last year, which also scored each parcel for its access to amenities.
“There should not be a new library, a new health centre, a new firehall — a new stadium — without lots of housing on top,” Whitzman said in an address Monday to a group that included city councillors and senior leaders in the local non-profit housing sector.
Co-presenter Kaite Burkholder Harris, executive director of the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, identified councillors Cathy Curry and Marty Carr as two champions of their work on the report.
Both councillors also sit on a working group with the mayor, which is leading a series of reviews of city spending on programs and services. In opening remarks at Monday’s presentation, Curry said the review is not about finding savings for the sake of it — it’s about identifying dollars that could be applied to term-of-council priorities, which will soon be formally established.
“One of them is housing. It has to be. I think we’re all in agreement,” said Curry, who represents Kanata North.
Referring to her fellow council members, Curry told Whitzman and Burkholder Harris that they have “25 people listening very carefully who want to do the right thing. And that right thing may look different for different people, but it’s not because they don’t understand the importance of this.”
Curry was to bring forward a motion at council’s planning and housing committee on Wednesday, where the Whitzman report was on the agenda. She wanted staff to review all of it, and if there was anything they didn’t agree with, to report back and explain why.
With the support of her colleagues at committee Wednesday, Curry directed city staff to consider the report’s recommendations, as they prepare to apply for funding next month under a federal program aimed at accelerating housing construction, and refresh Ottawa’s own 10-year housing and homelessness plan next year.
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