City of Ottawa not hitting affordable housing targets, but has tools to do it: audit

The City of Ottawa's auditor general says the city has not been hitting its affordable housing targets in recent years but it has the tools to do it.

The City of Ottawa's auditor general says the city has not been hitting its affordable housing targets in recent years but it has the tools to do it.

A new audit released by Auditor General Nathalie Gougeon says some of the reasons the city hasn't been hitting its targets are out of its control, but there are still things the city can do to improve the housing situation in the capital.

"The City has not met its new affordable housing unit goals in recent years, primarily due to funding availability from all levels of government and the capacity challenges in the housing development sector," Gougeon wrote. "Despite this, the City has structures, programs and tools in place to progress this portfolio."

According to the audit, the Housing Services Long-Range Financial Plan has a goal of adding 500 new affordable and/or supportive housing units annually, but the city has been far from reaching that goal in the past several years. According to figures, only 19 new affordable or supportive units were completed in 2020, 222 were completed in 2021, 30 were completed in 2022, and 214 were completed or anticipated in 2023.

"Though the number of new units created is below the targets, progress has been made including the development of a pipeline of projects to be built in the short and medium term. However, without increases in capacity and funding from all levels of government, these targets may not be realistic given the current trends in the housing sector," Gougeon writes.

Among the issues Gougeon's audit found were a lack of formalized collaboration structures, a narrow definition of lands that, when sold, contribute to affordable housing reserves, and a lack of a formal definition of what qualifies as "affordable" housing.

On the latter point, Gougeon notes the city works from several different definitions of what constitutes affordable housing, sometimes more than one at the same time.