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The Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa & Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, PhD, publicly launched the report “Our city Starts With Home: Scaling Up Non-Profit Housing in Ottawa” on May 1st 2023. Today the report will be presented to the City of Ottawa Planning & Housing Committee.
The report offers specific recommendations to scale up non-profit housing, making Ottawa a better City for all, where everyone has a place to live, receive the supports they require, and where organizations including City, non-profits, and community service organizations collaborate for the good of society. The report intends to show how we can each work together to scale up non-profit housing.
Why Ottawa?
The development of non-profit housing in Ottawa has a high likelihood of success, due to three factors:
- Ottawa has a large amount of surplus government-owned land;
- Ottawa non-profit housing providers have the capacity to scale up community, non-profit and co-op housing;
- The expansion of the LRT, and associated city-building, offer a perfect opportunity to trial inclusionary zoning targets.
The report emphasizes that the best way to create affordable housing will be in partnership with non-profit housing organizations on land owned by governments and Inclusionary Zoning in private developments.
Why emphasize land owned by government or non-profits?
- Well, it is reasonably inexpensive approach to scale up affordable housing.
Why non-profit homes?
- Using non-profit developers offers long-term affordability, since their mission is to provide housing at an affordable price rather than for financial gain. After years, non-profit rents are less expensive than equivalent rents in privately constructed rental housing.
- The majority of non-profit organizations in Ottawa have worked with Ottawa’s integrated Social Housing Registry, a caring team dedicated to helping people submit and update their applications for subsidized housing.
- They have the capacity to add extra financial aid, such the Canada Ontario Housing Benefit.
- For supporting services if required, they have the ability to concentrate supplementary support.
- Increased co-operation between non-profit organizations with complementary missions facilitated by Cahdco, such as women’s housing, Indigenous housing, housing for people with disability etc.
Cahdco contributed to the report, creating different development scenarios on government-owned sites to model project construction costs for different scales of development, and the potential funding sources that could support those developments.
The report will be brought to the Planning and Housing Committee on May 3, 2023.
If you are interested in reading the report, you can read it by clicking below:
Read the report here
