#484 Housing- Boardwalk or Baltic Avenue?

 

Housing, Homelessness, and Intensification: Where I Stand

Peter Karwacki · Ward 13 candidate · Rideau-Rockcliffe

Every candidate says housing is a priority. That's not a position, it's a mood. Here's the actual record, the actual numbers, and what I'd do with them.

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Homelessness: What's the plan?

The City already has a plan — the 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan (2020–2030), targeting 5,700 to 8,500 affordable and supportive units. 

Three years in, roughly 466 had been completed.  That's a plan quietly failing in public, with nobody at the council table treating the shortfall as the emergency it is.

I'm interested in why the existing one is underperforming and what gets fixed:

1. Publish the gap, not just the goal. A quarterly public dashboard comparing units promised, units funded, and units actually delivered — the same discipline I've pushed on LRT oversight and on the City's liabilities. If staff can track a $9.5-million tunnel repair timeline, it can track this.
2. Treat supportive housing as infrastructure, not a social file. Fast-track approvals for supportive and transitional housing the way the City fast-tracks projects it actually wants built. Right now the process timeline for supportive housing is indistinguishable from a market condo — that's a choice.
3. Stop treating shelter beds as the finish line. Emergency shelter capacity is a symptom response. The actual fix is permanent supportive housing with wraparound services, and the City's own numbers show we're building it at a fraction of the rate we said we would.
4. Find the money the way I've found it elsewhere. The City has shown it can locate hundreds of millions for cost overruns — Lansdowne 2.0's $419-million vote, the landfill purchased at $95 million against a $23-million estimate. A council that can find that kind of money for a stadium redevelopment can find a fraction of it for supportive housing, if the priority is real. 

Affordable Housing: Construction and timeline

The Auditor General has already done the math nobody wants to say out loud: reaching the City's own 5,000-unit affordable housing goal requires an estimated $188.4 million in City investment and $376.7 million in federal and provincial funding still to be secured. 

The federal Housing Accelerator Fund brought $176.3 million to the table. That's real money, but on the AG's own numbers it still leaves a gap in the hundreds of millions.

My approach:

• Itemize the gap publicly, the way I've itemized "What Ottawa Owes" on liabilities. Residents deserve to see the funding shortfall broken down by source — City capital, federal, provincial, private non-profit — not buried in a budget line that says "housing" and moves on.
• Timeline: within the first year, push for a revised, honest public target tied to capital actually committed, not the aspirational number from 2020 that the City is currently missing by an order of magnitude. A target nobody is on pace to hit isn't a plan, it's a talking point.
• Use the leverage a councillor actually has — site-plan approvals, surplus City land disposition, and the Housing Accelerator Fund conditions — to require non-profit and co-op partners get priority access to City-owned land, rather than land sitting as a line item while the waitlist (roughly 12,000 households) grows.
• Tie it to what I already know about capital delivery. I've spent this campaign asking why infrastructure gets approved without the servicing capacity behind it actually confirmed (see: Blair Road). Affordable housing has the mirror problem — funding gets announced without a delivery mechanism that's actually been stress-tested. Same discipline, same fix: don't announce the number until you can show the path to it.

Intensification: Is 60% realistic?

The City's Official Plan sets a 60-per-cent intensification target for growth in established areas by 2046, alongside a 1,281-hectare urban boundary expansion approved back in 2021. Is it realistic? On the numbers, it's aggressive but not fantasy — Ottawa needs to accommodate roughly 400,000 more people and close to 195,000 new homes over the plan horizon, and every serious housing economist will tell you sprawl-only growth is the more fiscally reckless option, not the safer one. Every kilometre of new pipe, road, and hydro line built outward is a long-term liability the City is signing residents up for without a matching revenue plan — which is exactly the kind of unfunded commitment I've spent this campaign flagging on other files.

So: realistic as a direction, yes. Realistic as currently resourced, no — because a target is not a delivery mechanism. The gap isn't the number, it's what's supposed to make the number happen: transit capacity, servicing capacity, and community infrastructure keeping pace with the density being approved. I've already documented what happens when growth outruns infrastructure — two federal science hubs landing on Blair Road with no public capacity study, a data-centre queue at 86 percent of the city's average electrical load with no allocation rule. Intensification without the same rigour is the same mistake in a residential jacket.

What I'd push for: every intensification approval in Ward 13 should come with a public capacity check — water, sewer, hydro, transit, school space — not as a bureaucratic afterthought, but as a condition published alongside the approval, the same way I've asked the City to do it for Blair Road and the Aviation Parkway corridor.

Zoning: Would you push for more changes?

The January 2026 zoning overhaul — four units as-of-right on every serviced lot, three-storey height permissions nearly everywhere, parking minimums eliminated — was overdue and I supported the direction. Council got that one right, unanimously, for once.

But "as-of-right" density only works if the "right" part is backed by actual capacity, and that's where I'd push next:

1. Pair further zoning liberalization with infrastructure disclosure, not silence. If a neighbourhood is being opened up to fourplexes, residents deserve to know whether the water and sewer mains under their street were sized for that load, the same way I've asked for Blair Road.
2. Push to extend as-of-right permissions closer to transit corridors and along main streets, where the City's own 15-minute-neighbourhood goals depend on it — the January bylaw was a floor, not a ceiling.
3. Fix the missing middle between fourplex and highrise. Ottawa still makes it hard to build the six-to-twelve-unit low-rise apartment building that used to be normal in neighbourhoods like this one before 2008-era zoning locked it out. That's the next zoning fight, and it's a quieter one than height limits but probably a bigger lever on actual supply.
4. Track it. Council passed a sweeping bylaw and then, true to form, hasn't built a public way to see whether it's actually producing units faster. I'd ask for that dashboard the same way I've asked for one on affordable housing.

Official Plan changes: Should the City use the province's new power?

The province, through Bill 60, has expanded ministerial authority and started delegating certain official-plan-amendment approvals to municipalities ahead of the standard review cycle — particularly around transit station areas. The question isn't whether the City can use that power before the mandatory five-year review. It's whether it uses it as a shortcut around scrutiny or as a tool applied with the same discipline it's supposed to have anyway.

My position: yes, use it — but only with the same conditions I've argued for on every other file where speed and oversight are in tension. An early amendment that unlocks housing near a transit station without a servicing capacity fight and a multi-year appeal process is a genuine win. An early amendment used to wave through a project that hasn't been checked against water, sewer, and hydro capacity is the Blair Road problem wearing a housing hat.

The condition I'd attach: any use of the early-amendment power gets a public capacity and infrastructure disclosure attached to it, the same standard I want applied to zoning and intensification approvals generally. Speed without disclosure isn't efficiency. It's just moving the accountability gap further from public view.

Other: What else is in the platform?

• Preserve what already exists. Every new unit announcement gets attention; losses to renoviction, deconversion, or aging co-op stock falling out of affordability don't. A councillor's job includes protecting the affordable units the City already has, not just chasing ribbon-cuttings for new ones.
• Federal-municipal coordination on land. Rideau-Rockcliffe sits next to significant federal landholdings — NCC parkway lands, the NRC Montreal Road campus, CMHC's own headquarters. CMHC is the national housing agency; if there's federal surplus land in this ward that could support affordable or supportive housing, I want that question asked publicly, the same way I've asked what's actually under Blair Road.
• Ward 13-specific renter data drives the ask. In Overbrook alone, roughly 26 percent of renters are in core housing need. That's not an abstract citywide statistic — it's a number that should be attached directly to how Ward 13's council vote gets used at the table, including on projects like Lansdowne where hundreds of millions moved through council without that comparison being made explicit.
• Data-centre and large-load electrical capacity ties directly into housing delivery. If Hydro Ottawa's queue is already at 86 percent of average system load with no allocation rule for who pays for network upgrades, that's not a side issue — it's a direct constraint on whether new housing intensification actually gets the electrical capacity it needs, on a timeline that matches the zoning permissions already granted.

This time around, inform yourselves. Vote differently. Vote wisely.

Vote Peter Karwacki for Rideau-Rockcliffe.

peterkarwacki.blogspot.com