Ottawa is behind schedule on building thousands of homes, according to builders at the first Ottawa Infrastructure Forum on Tuesday. The event was hosted by the Ottawa Board of Trade at Collège La Cité and brought together community leaders, builders, business owners and politicians to discuss how best to build up Ottawa. “The immediate priorities are around housing, transit and mobility, placemaking, and energy infrastructure as well,” said Sueling Ching, CEO and President of the Ottawa Board of Trade. The basis of these priorities is accommodating Ottawa’s growth, with the city’s population expected to grow by 400,000 to 500,000 people in the next 20 years. Currently, Ottawa isn’t building enough homes to contain that growth. “Ottawa has seen somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 people (added) every year, and it’s resulted in higher house prices,” says Jason Burggraaf, executive director of the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association. Burggraaf says Ottawa needs to be building between 12,000 to 15,000 new homes, consisting of all types of housing, including low rise, single units, semis, townhomes, detached homes, condos and apartment buildings. “Right now, this year we’re at about 9,000-ish, new homes on average every year. So, we’re sort of a little bit under that threshold,” said Burggraaf. “The objective for Ottawa has been about 15,000 units a year from the provincial government,” adds Chris MacKinnon, vice president of real estate company Rohit Group. “We’ve struggled to hit that in the last couple of years, and I think that there’s opportunity in front of us to do a little bit more to try to get there.” During Tuesday’s forum, there were discussions around how to increase density and residential spaces in Ottawa’s downtown core, with renewed calls to convert unused office buildings into affordable housing. In the same breath, builders say that it is more expensive to replace and upgrade old infrastructure downtown than it is to build new in suburban areas, leading to calls to expand Ottawa’s urban boundary. “The answer is we just need to do more,” said MacKinnon. “We need to build more. We need to provide more. We need to give more options.” Ottawa has been renowned for having a small city feel despite being a city of more than one million people. But Burggraaf says Ottawa needs to start acting like the big city it is and step up to the plate with funding to improve infrastructure and create those downtown living spaces. “You can still have your smaller town neighborhood contextual feel above the surface, but below the surface, and the transit that supports all these interconnected neighborhoods, needs to have big city thinking,” says Burggraaf. “Just invest in it now. A decision delayed today only costs more money next year or the year after, especially around infrastructure.”
