City falling short on affordable housing, needs better oversight: auditor general

The City of Ottawa isn't meeting its own targets to build affordable housing, and has to do a better job at co-ordinating and providing oversight of its affordable housing strategy, according to a report from the city's auditor general.

That's the first of nine recommendations that auditor general Nathalie Gougeon makes in her Audit of Affordable Housing, which was released late Friday afternoon. The “formalized governance structure” Gougeon recommends also includes a new oversight body “with the authority to prioritize and expedite key projects.”

That was welcome news for Kaite Burkholder-harris of the Alliance to End Homelessness. She said she's seen a lot of improvement in the city's housing strategy in recent years, but there's a long way to go.

“We are not currently driving toward a big-picture strategy on homelessness,” Burkholder-harris said. “We have some broad targets, but I'm not confident that those targets are directed toward needs. How much is directed at income levels? How many three-unit households do we need to build? How many one bedrooms do we need? We're not granular in our understanding about how we need to build.”

Gougeon also wants the city to use a “clear and consistent” definition of what it means by “affordable housing,” which can range from 30 per cent of a person's pre-tax income needed to pay rent at the low end to 80 per cent of average market rents at the high end.

But the average one-bedroom apartment in Canada rents for $2,100 a month, Burkholder-harris said, so calling 80 per cent of that “affordable” is unrealistic.

“Basing it on market rent is just so far beyond where incomes are for the vast majority of people,” she said.

“If we're expecting the private sector to build it and there's not a strict enough definition of what affordable housing means, then what they build won't match our housing need.”

But she also said that requiring rents be kept below 30 per cent of gross income may discourage private-sector developers. “They're going to sit on the land because it doesn't make sense for them because if you're in the private sector, you do need to make money. We need to be very thoughtful about where public money is going.”

The audit also said the city has to think more about affordable housing and less about generating revenue when it sells land for development — again, something Burkholder-harris agrees with.

“One thing the city does have is land — well-located government land owned by the city. If you put that land in the hands of a non-profit, that's huge. That can take 20-25 per cent off the cost of a build.”

The audit notes that the city had planned to build 500 units of affordable housing a year but, because of the pandemic and related labour and supply chain shortages, has built just 485 since 2020. That pace is ramping up and hundreds more units are in development, but “without increases in capacity and funding from all levels of government, these targets may not be realistic given the current trends in the housing sector,” the report said.

Sam Hersh of Horizon Ottawa agreed with the auditor saying that more federal and provincial funding will be needed to meet housing targets, but he also wants the city to commit more of its own money to affordable housing.