Housing Task Force Just More Of Same Thing: THE VOTER

04/24/2025

the.voter .logo

This is The Voter’s response to a Citizen column from Randall Denley entitled: “Politicians’ ambitious plans won’t fix the shortage of affordable housing.”

To read Denley’s column, click here.

—

Oh, Randall – surely you can’t be serious.

If these wonderful people on the new Housing Innovation Task Force have the answers to why our neighbours, family and friends can’t get a place to live that they can afford, why haven’t they shared them before now?

Yes, they do know about hammering nails into boards and thereby creating houses of one sort or another but do they know anything about the community and its actual housing needs? Do they know how to build appropriate housing that’s affordable and suitable for the families that will live in it? Do they know how to use materials and supplies that, while not top-of-the-line, suffice to create modest homes?

Do they know that a principal bedroom, with or without an ensuite bathroom, doesn’t have to rival a tennis court in size? Do they know that kitchen counters don’t have to be granite? Do they know that most families don’t need a two- or three-car garage? Do they know that not every backyard has to be large enough to accommodate an Olympic-size pool?

A New Way To Go Bust With Service Cuts

The answer is, of course, that they do know these things. The builders who are now building the homes that so few of us can afford are often the same builders who have built the not-for-profit and co-op housing across the city. No builder I’ve ever talked to has lost money on building affordable housing.

Many just prefer to make mega-profits instead of just profits. A decent builder can make a decent living building decent affordable housing for decent families. You just have to choose to do it.

A housing task force worth its salt would be made up of a cross-section of the interested parties. It would include some for-profit developers, some non-profit housing suppliers, some community members, some government reps and some people who understand from personal experience what ordinary Ottawans need in a place to live with their families.

That is unless the purpose of the task force is to bring us more of the type of housing development that excludes huge swaths of the community and/or to ensure the “solution” serves the interests of only the developers who are proposing it.

The status quo isn’t serving the community and the people named to this task force, i.e. those bringing us the status quo, are unlikely to lead us to a place very far from the status quo. When the questions are asked of the wrong people, one should not be surprised to find that the answers come up wanting.

Best to ask the right people in the first place if you want answers worth having.

The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.