What the 2025 progress report says — and what the numbers around it are actually say:
The City's 2025 progress report on the 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan lists a set of results for the year:
- 1,017 households housed from the Centralized Wait List
- 1,037 households housed from the shelter system
- 109 unsheltered individuals housed from encampments
- 388 households housed through Housing First
- 193 households housed through the Indigenous Housing First Program
- 525 low-income households housed through new housing benefits
- 31 affordable and 48 supportive housing units completed
- 907 affordable and 87 supportive housing units under construction as of December 31, 2025
Does this look like a year of real movement?
Read against the City's own companion data — and against the last two years of the same report — a different picture forms. This is a story about what gets counted, and what doesn't.
Outputs, not outcomes
Almost every number above describes a placement:
a household moved from a wait list, a shelter, or an encampment into a unit, usually in the existing private market with a subsidy or support attached.
That's roughly 3,200 placement events. It's a genuinely large amount of casework.
The system REALLY is working IF it's also shrinking the number of people who need placing — and the City's own data says it isn't.
The Centralized Wait List sat at over 12,400 households in 2023. By the 2024 Housing Needs Assessment it had grown to more than 15,000 — a two-thirds increase since 2020, with typical wait times stretching past seven years.
A separate 2026 city report on family homelessness found that the number of households exiting homelessness in 2025 actually dropped 41 per cent compared to the year before, even as the same year is being reported as a progress year in the plan document.
Families living in temporary hotel and motel placements — the costliest and least stable form of shelter — grew 76 per cent since 2023, reaching 664 families and over 1,200 children by March 2026, at a cost of roughly $30 million in hotel placements in 2025 alone.
Those two data points were published by the City itself, months apart, about the same calendar year.
One report says over 3,200 households were housed. Another says exits from homelessness fell sharply and family shelter reliance grew by three-quarters. Both can be true at once — housing more people from an ever-larger pool doesn't mean the pool is shrinking — but a progress report that only shows the first number is telling half the story.
The supply side hasn't moved in three years of reporting
Strip out the placement activity and look only at new stock, and the pattern gets sharper:
| Report year | New units highlighted |
|---|---|
| 2023 progress report | ~700 new affordable housing options created |
| 2024 progress report | Over 1,000 households housed from the wait list (no comparable completions figure highlighted) |
| 2025 progress report | 31 affordable + 48 supportive units completed |
Thirty-one affordable and 48 supportive units completed in a single year, against a wait list north of 15,000 households, is close to a rounding error on the supply side.
The 907 affordable and 87 supportive units "under construction" as of December 31 sound more substantial, but under construction is a pipeline status, not a delivery commitment — it says nothing about completion dates, nothing about how much of that count simply rolled over from a prior year without landing, and nothing about how it compares to what the 10-Year Plan actually targeted for this stage of its run.
Council's own recently refreshed plan flags 550 supportive units and 450 households on the supportive housing waitlist as the scale of need still outstanding — a number that dwarfs 48 completions.
Supportive housing deserves particular attention.
Forty-eight supportive completions against 109 people housed out of encampments in the same year is a mismatch worth naming: encampment residents disproportionately need supportive housing with wraparound services, not just an affordable unit. When the supportive pipeline can't keep pace with the people cycling out of encampments, some portion of that 109 is a reasonable bet to return to homelessness within the year — and that return doesn't show up anywhere in a report built around forward placements.
The context the report leaves out
None of the following figures appear in the 2025 progress report as excerpted, but all of them come from the City's own related publications from the same period:
- The 2024 Point-in-Time Count recorded 2,952 people experiencing homelessness in Ottawa, a 78.5 per cent increase since 2018.
- The shelter system was operating at over 81 per cent above capacity.
- Chronic homelessness, while a smaller share of the total, rose in absolute numbers from 813 to 1,279 people.
- Indigenous residents, roughly 2.6 per cent of Ottawa's population, made up 19 per cent of people counted in the 2024 Point-in-Time Count — useful context for reading the 193 households housed through the Indigenous Housing First Program against the scale of need in that community specifically.
A progress report is not obligated to be a comprehensive state-of-the-crisis document. But when the same department publishes both documents, and one shows steady placement activity while the other shows the underlying crisis growing faster than the placements can offset, accountability means reading them together rather than letting the more favourable one stand alone in public messaging.
What I'd want to see instead
If this were being reported the way a capital program or a construction schedule gets reported — the way my own PMP background says it should be — three things would be non-negotiable:
- A net figure, not just a gross one. Households housed minus new households entering homelessness or returning to it, so the public can see whether the system gained ground or just processed more people through the same size funnel.
- A multi-year completions trend, not a single year's snapshot. Is 79 total completions in 2025 up, flat, or down against 2023 and 2024? A single year's number, isolated, can't answer whether the pipeline is accelerating or stalling — and that's the number that actually reflects current council's delivery, since these projects have three-to-five year lead times from land assembly to occupancy.
- A reconciliation of "under construction" year over year. If 907 units were under construction at the end of 2025, how many of those were also under construction at the end of 2024? A pipeline that grows every year without a matching rise in completions is a pipeline that isn't converting.
None of this is a case against the people doing placement work in 2025 — that's real casework, and it matters to the households on the other end of it. It's a case for reporting that puts the placement wins next to the same year's exit numbers, completion numbers, and waitlist growth, so residents get the full picture rather than the flattering half of it. The 10-Year Plan refresh underway now is the right moment to ask for exactly that.
Sources
- City of Ottawa, 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan — progress reports and background: ottawa.ca/en/family-and-social-services/housing-and-homelessness/plans-facts-and-data/ottawas-10-year-housing-and-homelessness-plan
- City of Ottawa, 2023 Progress Report — 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan 2020–2030 (PDF): documents.ottawa.ca/sites/default/files/2023HHReport_EN.pdf
- City of Ottawa, 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan 2026–2035 (refreshed plan, includes 2020–2025 "sunsetting" summary) (PDF): documents.ottawa.ca/sites/default/files/HousingPlan2026-2035_EN.pdf
- City of Ottawa 2024 Housing Needs Assessment, as summarized by the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa: endhomelessnessottawa.ca/ottawa_housing_needs_assessment
- City of Ottawa 2024 Housing Needs Assessment, as summarized by HelpSeeker Technologies: helpseeker.org/reports/city-of-ottawa-housing-needs-assessment
- CBC News, "City forges new plan to house Ottawa's homeless families" (reporting on the City's 2026 family homelessness strategy report): cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-has-a-plan-to-house-homeless-families-9.7172355
Note: The 2025 Progress Report
Four Years, One Number: Zero
ReplyDeleteOttawa just finished a four-year process to build a tool for requiring affordable housing near transit — and the tool now requires nothing. . It's thel outcome of the framework council approved this spring for inclusionary zoning (IZ), the land-use mechanism that lets a municipality force developers to set aside a share of units in new buildings as affordable housing near transit stations. timeline
June 2022:Council directs staff to pursue set-aside targets as high as 10% for both ownership and purpose-built rental units in Protected Major Transit Station Areas — the zones around LRT stations where density and height are concentrated.
Late 2022: Queen's Park moves first. Bill 23 caps what municipalities are allowed to require at 5%, well below what Ottawa's own planning committee had been considering. City staff and housing advocates alike flag it as a dilution of the target. **June 2025:**
A market assessment required under provincial regulation concludes that IZ isn't currently economically feasible near transit — that market-rate development is already strained enough that adding a set-aside requirement risks tipping transit-oriented projects into non-viability.
April 2026:Council formally adopts a "market-based" framework with a set-aside rate of **zero per cent**.
No mandatory affordable units. The legal architecture for IZ now exists — definitions, affordability thresholds, a 25-year duration requirement — but the operative number is nothing.
Q2 2028: The earliest point at which the City has committed to redoing the market assessment that would be required before council could consider raising the rate above zero.
What actually happened here Four years of process. Two full assessment reports. A provincial statute intervening halfway through. And the deliverable at the end of it is a framework that, on the numbers that matter, changes nothing about what gets built or how affordable it is — with the next real decision point pushed out to 2028, six years after the process started.
This is worth sitting with, because it's a pattern residents of Rideau-Rockcliffe should recognize by now: **a lot of motion, very little movement.** The City can point to a completed Official Plan directive, a market assessment, a Discussion Paper, committee approval, and a Council vote — a full paper trail of institutional activity.
What it can't point to is a single unit of housing that will be more affordable because of this policy, today, or for the next two years at minimum.
None of this means IZ was a bad idea, or that the feasibility concerns raised by the market assessment weren't real. Ottawa isn't unique here — inclusionary zoning is a genuinely difficult tool to calibrate, and the province suspending it in other municipalities suggests this isn't a local failure of will so much as a structural tension between affordability mandates and development viability in a high-cost market.
But that's exactly why the "zero-but-ready" framing matters. It lets the City claim it has *acted* on affordable housing near transit, while the actual policy lever sits at zero for at least two more years. Outputs — reports, frameworks, committee approvals — are being substituted for outcomes: affordable units that exist.
The accountability question When this file comes back to council in 2027 and 2028, the question worth asking isn't "did we build the framework." That box is checked. The question is whether anyone tracks — publicly, with real numbers — how many PMTSA developments were approved in the meantime with **zero** affordable units attached, and whether the eventual set-aside rate, whenever it arrives, actually catches up to the growth that happened while the number sat at zero. That's the kind of tracking a structural accountability approach demands: not "did council vote for a housing tool," but "what did the tool actually deliver, on what timeline, measured against what was promised in 2022." Four years from directive to zero. Worth remembering the next time affordable housing near transit comes up as a council accomplishment.
ReplyDelete