Members of Ottawa’s homebuilding and renovation industry heard four mayoral candidates debate housing issues at a sold-out event on Thursday.
The current mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, Ward 15 (Kitchissippi) Coun. Jeff Leiper, economist Neil Saravanamuttoo and construction entrepreneur Alex Lawson — the leaders in a crowded field of 14 candidates — staked out their positions on more than a dozen housing issues at the debate, which was hosted by the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association and the Ottawa Real Estate Board.
The event, which inevitably included some sniping but remained generally well-mannered, was attended by 230-plus members of the local housing and related industries.
Topics included making home ownership or renting more affordable, the speed of municipal approvals for housing projects, whether additional housing needs take precedence over concerns about neighbouring character, intensification versus expanding the urban boundary, and others.
To increase affordability, Saravanamuttoo touted the missing middle — multi-unit buildings of four to six storeys — as a key neighbourhood-friendly infill solution. He said that while lobbying the provincial government to reform laws to accommodate projects is necessary, “… we also need to make sure that at municipal level we have the zoning and the regulations and all of the other elements required to promote more smaller-scale infill … that’s really how we address the ownership issue and affordability.”
He would also scale up affordable rental housing like the projects by Ottawa Community Housing in Centretown West and Little Italy.
Responders to Saravanamuttoo included Leiper, who said he intended to use municipal lands that the city is “sitting on” to get more nonprofit housing built.
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The slow pace of municipal approvals for housing projects is a long-standing complaint by builders. Asked what approval timelines builders should reasonably expect, Sutcliffe said: “We need to move a lot faster. It’s as simple as that,” while also saying the process has sped up during his four years in office. He added that he planned to reconvene the Housing Innovation Task Force and that the city needed to hire more people as well using AI to move the process along.
Lawson weighed in on that, saying “the biggest issue, was the amount of time from the approval to actually registering the site file. That was up to 649 days. It increased by … more than a year in your term” and that four builders have now gone to the Ontario Land Tribunal because of tardiness.
With the province predicting that Ottawa’s population will increase by 500,000 people over the next 20 years (growth that Leiper questioned), candidates tackled the issues of urban boundaries and whether the need for more affordable housing takes precedence over neighbourhood character.
Leiper said the question of expanding the urban boundary is “fraught” and that many in the room were opposed to expansion.
“It poses a huge environmental and economic cost on future generations. We know what happens in those far-flung suburbs when the pipes begin to fail, and the pipes are so long,” he said. “[T]he taxes that you’re paying today are too high because of the development patterns since the end of the war.”
Leiper added that if the boundary is expanded, new parcels need to be adjacent to existing infrastructure, including transit.
While Sutcliffe said the city has to be open to a balance of both expansion and intensification, Saravanamuttoo said the city can no longer afford the infrastructure costs of continued expansion and should instead focus on intensification using undeveloped parcels like Confederation Heights.
Lawson rejoined by saying non-growth was not a good idea and that expansion should be based on the desires of prospective homeowners, including backyards and the roads that will allow them to drive to Costco.
On additional affordable housing versus neighbourhood character, Saravanamuttoo said that providing more neighbourhood improvements would help residents see the benefits that more housing brings, while Lawson said that better public information on infrastructure capacity would assist in bringing residents on board.
The debaters also kicked around the idea of creating a public utility for water and wastewater management. That led to Leiper’s proposal for a one per cent levy to pay construction and maintenance of infrastructure and a baffling segue that produced a minor dust-up between Lawson and Sutcliffe on the ByWard Market, with the former claiming market businesses were unhappy with the city’s efforts, while the mayor said visitor numbers and business investment are booming.
The debate wrapped up with a closing statement by each candidate. They all made general campaign pitches — a missed opportunity to summarize their key points on the complex issue of housing in Ottawa.
