Every few months, Ottawa announces another affordable housing project. A capital allocation, a funding round, a groundbreaking. The press release always reads the same way: X units, Y million dollars, a ribbon somewhere. What it never tells you is where — and more importantly, whether "where" was ever asked as a real question, or just a default answer to "which parcel does the city already own."
That's the problem. Not affordable housing itself. The pattern of how we site it.
The default is concentration, not a choice
When a municipality builds affordable housing, the path of least resistance is almost always the same: find a large, already-assembled, already-zoned, city-owned or easily-acquired parcel, and put a big development on it. It's cheaper to plan. It's cheaper to build. It clears a capital budget line in one motion instead of ten.
But cheaper to build is not the same as better for the people who will live there — or for the neighbourhood absorbing them. Concentrating low-income housing in a handful of large sites has a well-documented downside: it clusters need in the same place it clusters need, entrenching under-resourced pockets rather than solving them. A cross-program review of U.S. assisted housing programs found that residents of large-scale public housing consistently end up in more disadvantaged surrounding neighbourhoods than residents of almost any other housing model — vouchers, tax-credit developments, mixed-income redevelopment all perform better on this measure. That's not an accident of history. It's what concentration does, structurally, regardless of the good intentions behind the funding.
The alternative — scattered-site development, where affordable units are distributed in smaller numbers across many streets and many neighbourhoods — is not a fringe idea. It has a research base, and the findings point in a consistent direction. Studies of scattered-site public housing find higher resident satisfaction and stronger community integration, without the drag on nearby property values that concentration critics often assume will follow. Some scattered-site models — duplexes and small multiplexes with private outdoor space instead of one large complex — even expand housing choice for the tenants themselves. One Philadelphia model reclaiming vacant rowhomes block by block found something counter-intuitive: distributing the affordable units drove noticeably higher home-value appreciation in the surrounding area than concentrated new-build projects did — the opposite of the "affordable housing drags down property values" argument city hall quietly worries about but never says out loud.
Dispersal also does something concentration structurally cannot: it lowers stigma. A resident of six units folded into an existing block is a neighbour. A resident of a 250-unit complex everyone in the city already refers to by a nickname is a data point in someone else's political argument.
What this means for Rideau-Rockcliffe
Rideau-Rockcliffe is not exempt from this pattern — it is, arguably, a textbook case of the two extremes the city keeps toggling between. On one end, large single-site developments concentrated in specific pockets. On the other, wards and neighbourhoods that see essentially none, insulated by geography, zoning history, or simple political friction. Neither extreme is a housing strategy. Both are the absence of one — the city defaulting to whatever parcel is easiest to move, rather than asking where affordable housing should go to actually integrate people into the life of the ward: near transit, near schools, near the grocery store, distributed enough that "affordable housing" stops being a place on a map and starts being a scattering of addresses indistinguishable from any other.
This is where Ottawa's own inclusionary zoning file becomes relevant, and not in a flattering way. The city's own recently approved inclusionary zoning framework — the tool explicitly meant to fold affordable units into ordinary market developments as they're built, rather than warehousing them separately — was approved with the mandatory set-aside rate set at zero per cent, pending a market reassessment years down the road. In other words: the framework exists on paper, but the mechanism that would actually force dispersal into new buildings across the city, unit by unit, building by building, has been suspended before it ever activated. The tool built for exactly the outcome housing-integration research supports has been shelved for "market feasibility," with no firm date for it to come back into force before a 2028 reassessment.
That's not a technical footnote. That's the accountability gap. A council can vote for a policy framework and simultaneously vote to make sure it does nothing, and both actions get filed under the same press release about "progress on housing." Nobody is lying, exactly. But nobody is being held to an outcome either — which is the whole pattern this campaign keeps documenting, from the Ādisōke library to the landfill purchase to LRT oversight: commitments made in public, and the actual mechanism for delivering them quietly deferred, diluted, or left for a future council to sort out.
What accountability looks like here
I'm not arguing against affordable housing in Rideau-Rockcliffe. I'm arguing against the version of it that shows up as one large announcement in one location, satisfies a capital target, and calls the file closed. A real integration strategy means:
- Setting an explicit dispersal target for the ward — not just a unit count, but a distribution requirement across multiple sites and multiple neighbourhoods within Rideau-Rockcliffe, not concentrated near the ward's boundary with more receptive council votes.
- Treating small-scale infill and adaptive reuse (converting existing underused buildings, small parcels, laneway and secondary suites) as a first option, not an afterthought to the big-parcel default.
- Actually activating the inclusionary zoning mechanism the city already voted to create, rather than letting a zero-per-cent set-aside sit indefinitely as a box-checking exercise for federal funding eligibility.
- Reporting dispersal outcomes publicly and specifically — not "units delivered," but where, so residents can see whether integration is actually happening or whether the same easy parcels keep getting reused.
Affordable housing that works isn't measured only in units. It's measured in whether the people living in it are genuinely part of the neighbourhood around them — not set apart from it by the very design of where the city chose to put them.
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