By Dana Townsend
The city is pushing ahead with plans to pump up downtown – leaving some people to wonder if the price for a more profitable downtown will mean even less affordable housing.
Stan Wilder, a senior policy planner for Ottawa, says the city needs “ways to attract new development to downtown,” and especially more residents.
He says that bringing more residents to downtown could liven the area up after dark, instead of the “ghost town” it becomes after civil servants leave for the day.
Wilder says this will also cause increased demand for evening shopping, theatre performances and restaurants, giving a boost to downtown businesses.
The city held an open house on urban re-design earlier this month, where it introduced Urban Strategies Inc., the firm hired to handle the planning of a new urban Ottawa.
The city’s plans for revitalizing downtown come with a cost though – and not just the millions of dollars it will take to develop Centretown and other areas.
Low-income residents already have a difficult time finding affordable housing, but the trend of demolishing cheaper housing to make way for more expensive units such as condominiums has been increasing in urban centres such as Toronto, according to Mary Tuduro at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario.
Tuduro says older, more affordable housing is being demolished faster than new housing goes up, which means rental prices have been increasing as tenant incomes have been decreasing.
Catherine Boucher has witnessed first-hand the increasing loss of affordable housing to the growing condominium market in Ottawa over the last five years.
As executive director of the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp. (CCOC), she helps to manage 1,300 household units rented to low-income residents.
Altogether, Boucher says, there are approximately 22,000 social housing units in Ottawa, but that number is not nearly enough to satisfy the housing shortage.
Her organization has at least 13,000 households on a waiting list and the waiting list itself can be five to eight years long.
Boucher says that low-income residents who can’t get into affordable housing end up living in substandard housing, or paying most of their income to rent, instead of medicine, clothing or food.
“They’re hungry, or the kids are hungry,” says Boucher.
Community developers worry that this trend of demolition and redevelopment — and the loss of affordable housing — will only increase if the downtown attracts new residents.
They say it is imperative for the city to be involved in protecting affordable housing development.
“We see a really strong will and interest on the city’s part on this issue,” says Sue Murrill, community developer at Pinecrest-Queensway Health and Community Services.
She says the city has targeted 25 per cent of all new housing built to be available to the low or moderate income bracket in the draft 2020 official plan.
Unfortunately, Murrill says, the city’s definition of low income is still too high to include many residents, and will in fact maintain the “status quo” of housing shortage.
That hasn’t stopped the city from trying. Wilder says the city has raised money from the federal and provincial governments to help build more affordable housing.
“We’re quite excited about having the new housing program,” says Wilder of the estimated 250 units the city is planning to build this year, with the same number allotted for the next four years.
The city will continue to collect information about low-income housing and solicit proposals. It promises to include low-income residents in mixed-use development.