Who's Actually Building Housing in Ward 13
Every registered candidate in this election just received the same letter from Ottawa Community Housing. It's a good letter — informative, well-produced, and useful if a tenant stops you at the door with a maintenance question. It leads with the numbers OCH is proudest of: roughly 15,500 homes, more than 33,000 tenants, the fourth-largest community housing provider in the country, about 1,000 homes currently under construction and another 1,110 in the design pipeline.
Those are real, citywide numbers. But a candidate letter is an output. What matters to a Ward 13 voter is the outcome: how much of that scale actually reaches Rideau-Rockcliffe, and on what timeline. So I went and checked.
What's actually moving in Ward 13
Here's what recent, verifiable activity looks like on the ground, organized by who's actually building — not by who sent the letter.
Two things stand out. First, the single largest OCH-attributed number in the ward — the 271 units at Mikinak Road — is also the oldest and least current. Second, the only project that has actually moved through council approval in the last twelve months in Ward 13's affordable-housing file, the 62-unit Presland Road building, isn't OCH's. It's the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation's, replacing a building lost to an alleged arson in 2023.
The rent gap OCH's own letter shows you
OCH's letter includes a striking 2025 rent comparison for a 2-bedroom unit in Ottawa. It's worth sitting with, because it's the clearest illustration of why the *pace* of delivery matters as much as the promise of it.
The gap between $370 and $2,504 is the entire argument for why community housing exists. It's also the argument for why a five-year-old, unaddressed file on aging OCH stock in this ward isn't a footnote — every year a unit sits un-renewed or a planned building stays unbuilt is a year that gap doesn't close for another family on the list.
What this means for Ward 13
None of this is a claim that OCH is failing citywide — the 2025 groundbreaking on Gladstone Village downtown and its broader development pipeline suggest real capacity. The claim is narrower and more useful to a Ward 13 voter: the organization that just wrote to every candidate about its scale has a thinner and slower record inside this specific ward than the letter implies, and the most recent tangible win here came from a different non-profit entirely.
That's the pattern I keep coming back to in this campaign: a press release is an output. A unit that a family can move into is an outcome. Ward 13 deserves a representative who tracks the difference — and who asks OCH, directly and on the record, what happened to the Overbrook file.
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