By Pamela Stephens
Rental vacancy in Ottawa is higher right now than it has been over the last three years. So really, it should be easy to find a place…unless you are counted as a member in one of the 12,000 households in the city on the waiting list for affordable housing units.
“This vacancy increase is definitely in the upper end of the income strata,” confirms Ishbel Solvason, executive director for the Social Housing Registry of Ottawa-Carleton. One-third of all the rental tenants in Ottawa are spending 30 per cent or more of their gross household income on rent, a percentage that is deemed “unaffordable” says Solvason.
Right now there is a five to seven year waiting list for affordable housing in Ottawa.
Half the people on this list are children and 95 per cent of them come from households with combined incomes of less than $30,000 per year, says Ray Sullivan of Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation (CCOC).
“If people have to wait ten years to get into affordable housing and in three years are faced with being evicted and on the street, then this is certainly no way to organize social housing,” he says.
The City of Ottawa could take control of the housing crisis it is faced with by taking the initiative to stop private developers from building more high-priced units and therefore address and make use of the existing vacancy, but instead, politics takes priority.
By passing off the responsibility of social housing to the province for fear of overstepping its authority, the city has failed to fulfill its obligation to its more vulnerable citizens.
The vacancy rate in Ottawa has jumped over one per cent in the past 10 years, yet the rent increase in the city has jumped about 30 per cent over the same period, an all-time high and the largest increase of any region in the country.
The average rent for a two-bedroom rental unit in Ottawa is $1,117, second highest next to Toronto nationwide.
The vacancy rate for affordable units in the city is a different story, with 0.2 per cent vacancy for bachelor apartments and 1.7 per cent for one-bedroom accommodations with below average rents.
Market fluctuations should eventually respond to the increase in vacancy with a gradual reduction of rental costs, but renters currently struggling to meet their monthly payments may not have time to wait.
The basic human need of shelter should not depend on the random pendulum swing of the economy, says Sullivan.
“For these private developers, it comes down to if they’re given the choice between high and lower income renters. It’s not a difficult one,” he says. “They’re in the business to make a buck and you can’t [make money] renting to poor people.”
The waiting list for affordable housing is consistently growing with 5,000 new applicants each year, but Solvason says it is hard to say how many on the list are still waiting and how many have faded in the shadows of the city, unable to be relocated.
Social housing needs cannot be adequately met if threat of eviction and homelessness is imminent for the applicants, resulting in a list full of unreachable people.
For every apartment built, 1.5 are lost each year to demolition or condominium conversions; affordable housing units have been reduced by 6.3 per cent since 1991, a net loss of 4,500 units so far, according to CCOC.
“We were trying to get 25 per cent of new development devoted to households in the $40,000 to $55,000 per year income bracket, but the City would only commit to this as a target, not a requirement,” says Sullivan. “It’s all words, no stick and this isn‘t even scraping the surface of the real problem demographic.”
The provincial government has a poor track record here, especially since in 1993 federal housing funding was cut from the budget and changes to the Tenant Protection Act eliminated rent control and placed the burden of social housing needs on municipalities.
With the City and the province both passing the buck, who is taking responsibility here?
Current market data and trends are expected to be released in November by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) but Christian Douchant, a market analyst for the Ottawa region, says “it’s a tenant’s market,” and landlords are entirely justified in raising the rent if they want to.
“People vote with their feet,” says Douchant. “Landlords are entirely justified in raising the cost of rent as long as the demand exists but it is highly unlikely they will do so, given the state of the rental market today.”
Are these landlords “entirely justified” in hiking the rent? In this city, with as many students, immigrants and elderly people on fixed incomes, the renting cost is already far beyond what they can afford and this kind of mentality will only perpetuate the current problem.
The City needs to stand up for its citizens and take real measures to solve this problem, not mere Band-Aid solutions for the gaping wound the provincial government has created in cutting support for social housing.