On February 5, 2025, we presented to the City of Ottawa's Planning and Housing Committee about a motion put forward by Kichissippi Ward Councillor Jeff Leiper, chair of the committee.
The motion would permit shelters in all urban zones, bringing forward an amendment to the City's comprehensive zoning bylaw that would permit shelter use in all urban zones in the city. Leiper moved the motion to bring the current bylaws in line with the Official Plan in advance of a comprehensive bylaw review later this year.
Read or watch our deputation below.
Watch our deputation on YouTube
On behalf of the Alliance to End Homelessness, I’m glad to see a motion that recognizes people need housing, services and supports in every part of our community. Enabling City staff and community partners to react quickly to community needs is essential to respond to a rapidly changing homelessness crisis.
This motion is important to protect future residents and community partners who will be living in new affordable housing builds from increasingly aggressive community consultations. While it’s valuable for community members to be engaged in housing developments in their neighbourhoods, the consultation process has become increasingly aggressive, prejudiced and racist, with some awful recent examples where they needed to be shut down because participants were out of line.
Alliance member agencies have had their own staff targeted by community members through these consultations, finding their private information and threatening them - all for trying to build affordable housing. Consultations are meant to be a chance to ask questions, share concerns, and learn more about a new affordable housing development. Instead, they have become a referendum on who gets to live in a neighbourhood. We can’t keep having this conversation for every new affordable housing build when the need is so great. I commend Council and staff for moving forward with this motion to address this challenge in adding new forms of affordable housing across the city.
I’d also like to highlight some pieces that are not entirely clear, and moving forward would be helpful in future zoning discussions, particularly as they have significant impacts on how we plan our housing and homelessness system. There are several definitions for emergency shelter and transitional shelters in City documents, with inconsistencies between the two.
Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of clarity on the distinctions between an emergency shelter and transitional shelters and the motion uses both of these terms.
Both definitions state that support services are provided, and use the almost interchangeable terms “short-term accommodation” for shelter, and “temporary accommodation” for transitional shelter. Neither mentions arguably the most important distinction, which is that one is a congregate setting and one is a place where you have your own unit. The difference between these is significant and people experience more stability when they have a lock and key.
Emergency shelters are a critical part of the homelessness and housing system. If someone is in a housing crisis, we need a safe place for them to land for a short period of time. Shelter stays are intended to be rare, brief, and non-recurring. Despite this goal however, in recent years, in the face of overwhelm, exhaustion, and the very real fact that we do not want people to die, we have significantly increased shelter beds in our community, with services concentrated in downtown communities. People do better when they have geographic choice for services. This motion addresses this barrier for many in our community who are struggling to find affordable housing and support.
The Alliance did a recent system inventory showing that for time-limited programs across Ottawa, 77% of them extend their timelines significantly. This was particularly prominent with transitional housing. This demonstrates the lack of flow we have in our current homelessness and housing system. Our existing shelters don’t have the funding to maintain their current operations, meaning even less opportunity to reduce flow into shelters and support flow out of shelters.
It’s often said that the role of shelters is to work their way out of a job. I would refine this to say that it’s to work their way into a new one - providing forms of transitional and affordable housing. All of our local shelters are already doing this, alongside their emergency services. Not being confronted with community backlash every time that they move in this direction is so valuable, as this motion addresses.
Despite progress in developing more transitional and supportive housing, we continue to invest in new emergency shelter beds, because it seems that it’s the quickest, most do-able action we can take.
We’re not alone. In Ontario, we’ve increased emergency shelter beds by 34% since 2016. During the same time period, overall homelessness has increased by 32%. In other words, we are buying homelessness.
My caution about this motion is that we may also be creating an un-intentioned “escape hatch” to keep adding more shelter beds to our system, by using the language of emergency shelter, rather than increasing transitional affordable housing in every ward. We absolutely need different forms of affordable housing and services in every community in our city and I strongly support Council’s action here. However, I urge you to be cautious that we don’t increase our investment in a temporary response, but rather focus our efforts on rapidly increasing affordable housing all across our community.
It is incredibly challenging in the face of crisis to see beyond the immediate need. But our housing and homelessness response requires us to do this. The Official Plan and 10 Year Plan are a key part of this critical shift in how we design, zone, and plan for an end to homelessness.
We look forward to working with closely with the City as we refresh the 10 Year Plan this year to push for bolder, better outcomes for people.
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