A local initiative is putting pressure on mayoral candidates to prioritize housing in the coming municipal election.
Canada’s capital will undergo a municipal election in 2022, replacing outgoing three-term mayor Jim Watson.
In 2020, Watson made Ottawa the first Canadian city to declare a housing crisis.
The three candidates who have so far put their names in are Somerset Ward Coun. Catherine McKenney, Gloucester-Southgate Coun. Diane Deans, and former mayor and current MPP for Ottawa West-Nepean Bob Chiarelli.
Ottawa’s Alliance to End Homelessness launched Starts With Home on Wednesday, a campaign aiming to inform voters about how each candidate is approaching housing and homelessness.
CHUO spoke to executive director Kaite Burkholder Harris about the campaign on Wednesday.
“We want to use it to pull and build that political pressure so that candidates really have to answer for this and actually have concrete plans when they get elected to tackle homelessness seriously,” says Burkholder-Harris.
Starts With Home, which outlines six measures to address the housing crisis, is intended to “make sure the next City Council prioritizes affordable housing.” The platform puts the onus on city officials to ensure that housing is affordable, fair, and guarantees tenant rights.
In Ontario, housing regulation and policy is governed by the Residential Tenancies Act and enforced by a tribunal called the Landlord Tenant Board.
“We're in a bit of an interesting situation in that Ottawa is interpreting a lot of that legislation differently than other Ontario cities,” says Burkholder-Harris. “It's true, so much of it is governed by the province. But… the city still has tools.”
Burkholder-Harris says other Ontario cities such as Toronto have begun to implement housing legislation at a municipal level. By expanding the conditions for eviction notices, and providing stricter limitations on those powers, cities could better prevent arbitrary evictions.
Affordable housing is defined as housing that costs below 30 per cent of a household’s monthly income before taxes. In Ottawa, the average price of a one-bedroom apartment rental is about $1,500 a month, which would require a person to make around 30 dollars an hour to be considered affordable.
Current provincial legislation prevents landlords from raising rent prices beyond a certain threshold each year. However, “renovictions” and “demovictions” have become common tools for landlords to evict low-income tenants and attract those with bigger budgets.
“And we know there's more and more situations where the unit pops back up on the market in the same year for a much higher price,” says Burkholder-Harris. “So we're in a housing market that just incentivizes that in a lot of ways.”
The Starts With Home campaign highlights a need for more funding towards affordable housing in the municipal budget. In 2020, the city implemented an amended 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan which sought to build 500 new units of affordable housing each year and reduce homelessness by 25 per cent by the year 2030.
Starts With Home wants to see that goal doubled, with 1,000 new affordable housing units added annually and homelessness reduced by 50 per cent by 2030.
The extra funding would also subsidize maintenance and repair costs for smaller property management companies and landlords who otherwise might cut their losses and sell the property. Additionally, the campaign is calling for a licensing system for landlords to ensure greater accountability and maintenance standards.
There is no promise Ottawa’s mayoral candidates will heed the recommendations from the Starts With Home campaign. But with the cost of housing in Ottawa rising by more than 20 per cent over 2021, and projected to rise by nearly eight per cent during 2022, Kaite-Burkholder Harris says residents will demand affordable housing.
“Treating housing like an investment isn't working,” says Burkholder-Harris. “It’s making our city exclusive, making it a place where not everyone can live, making it tough for businesses to hire people who can afford to live here. Families are choosing rent versus food.”
To learn more about the Starts With Home campaign and how to get involved, visit the webpage here.