Ottawa’s mayor announces plan to lower housing fees, increase downtown development

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe wants to make Ottawa the most housing-friendly city in Canada with a new plan to speed up development. CTV’s Tyler Fleming reports.

The City of Ottawa is looking to lower housing development fees and boost development downtown as part of a new plan to boost housing development.

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe unveiled the new Housing Action Plan Friday at City Hall.

“This is quite simply the most ambitious housing plan in our city’s history. It’s the biggest overhaul of our planning process ever,” he said.

According to the Mayor, the plan has 53 actions and five main objectives, which are to simplify and speed up approvals, build a pro-housing culture at City Hall, lower costs and fees, strengthen affordable housing development and unlock urban intensification and transit-oriented development.

“We’re going to remove barriers, speed up approvals, we’re going to make it easier to get shovels in the ground,” the mayor said. One of the five objectives is to “introduce more flexibility in fees and charges.”

“We will pause, reduce or be more flexible on a wide range of fees and charges. We’ll pause fees, like Community Benefit charges, for the next five years, immediately reducing costs on multi-residential units by four per cent of their land value,” Sutcliffe said.

“We’ll also allow Development Charges and other upfront costs to be deferred, interest fee, until much later in the building process. We’ll keep working with our federal and provincial partners to find ways to reduce development fees by funding infrastructure in other ways. We’ll waive some fees for non-profit affordable housing projects, and we’ll handle legal agreements with more speed and flexibility.”

The mayor says if the recommendations are approved by the city council on Oct. 8, 40 per cent of them will be implemented immediately. Another 40 per cent will be reviewed by city council over the next year.  

“This is a plan, that thinks about the short-term and I would say the medium-term for housing,” says Debbie Stewart, the Strategic Initiatives General Manager and Co-chair of the Housing Innovation Task Force.

In January, the mayor announced plans for city’s new Housing Innovation Task Force, tasked with looking at ways to build more housing, faster and more affordability. Sutcliffe says the average retail price of a home has increased by 50 per cent over the last six years, while rent has increased by 30 per cent.  

“The DCs [developer costs] are going to get deferred, and it will help first and foremost with the capitalization of a project, kind of how much you have to put upfront,” says Jason Burggraaf, executive director with Greater Ottawa Homebuilders’ Association. “As opposed to say, having to front up $100 million on a large project, because you have to pay all those development costs when you go for your building permit, now builders can wait until occupancy and that means the builder has collected the full purchase price from that homebuyer.”

At the end of August, Ottawa had 6,694 housing starts on the year, up from 4,374 at the same point last year.

“It allows developers to build more and to build faster, otherwise you’re sinking a lot of money into a project and you might not have enough to move on the second and third project on your list until you finish finalize that one,” says Burggraaf. “This could conceivably allow builders to have several projects, or if they have several projects, have several more projects on the go all at the same time. But we need to go. Housing starts are up over 60 per cent from last year, but last year was a very poor year overall and our 6,000 housing starts, to this point this year, is really well below where we want to be. We want to be at 12,000 to 15,000.”

Earlier this week, the mayor announced a pledge to end youth homelessness by 2030.

With files from CTV News Ottawa’s Tyler Fleming

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