A Balanced Approach to Growth: Focusing New Housing Where It Belongs

City Council approved a new comprehensive housing strategy designed to help address Ottawa’s ongoing housing crisis. The plan, titled The City of Ottawa’s Comprehensive Housing Strategy 2025, is one of the most significant efforts in years to modernize how we plan and build homes. It aims to remove unnecessary barriers, speed up approvals, and make it easier to build more housing, particularly in the urban core.

The plan focuses on five key objectives: simplifying the rules and making approvals faster, creating a housing-friendly culture at City Hall, being more flexible with fees and charges, better supporting affordable housing, and building more homes downtown and near transit. I support the principle behind this plan because Ottawa needs to build more homes, faster. But it is equally important that we build them in the right places where services exist.

For far too long, planning in Ottawa has treated all parts of the city as though they face the same challenges. They do not. Rural Ottawa, and Ward 21 in particular, has already seen more than its fair share of growth over the past two decades. Villages like Manotick and Richmond have welcomed thousands of new homes and families.

At the same time, much of urban Ottawa has not kept pace. Many downtown neighbourhoods still have underused land, outdated zoning, and infrastructure capable of supporting far more people than currently live there. This new housing plan rightly focuses on addressing that imbalance.

The City’s strategy makes it clear that the majority of future growth should happen in areas that already have the infrastructure to support it, including sewer and water systems, frequent transit, schools, and community services. These are the places where density makes sense.

About 40 per cent of the plan’s actions will take effect immediately, including reducing Community Benefits Charges for five years, deferring development charges until occupancy, offering reimbursements for non-profit affordable housing projects, introducing expedited permits through pre-set building designs, and temporarily reducing or waiving certain parkland fees while the City reviews those policies. These changes are aimed at making it easier to build within the urban core, especially near major transit lines. That is exactly where the City should be encouraging growth. It is more sustainable, it reduces traffic congestion, and it makes better use of existing infrastructure.

Here in rural Ottawa, we have already experienced significant development over the past 20 years. Richmond has doubled in size, and Manotick continues to grow rapidly. With each new subdivision, our roads, schools, and local services are pushed closer to their limits. Our communities have contributed their fair share to the city’s overall housing supply. What we need now is stability, not more expansion. Rural infrastructure simply is not designed to support high-density development, and expanding too quickly risks undermining the qualities that make our villages so desirable in the first place.

That is why I am encouraged that this new housing plan focuses squarely on downtown and transit-oriented growth. Ottawa’s urban core has room to grow.

As Council moves forward with this plan, I will continue advocating for policies that respect the distinct realities of rural life. That means ensuring that new zoning tools and fee structures are applied fairly, and that rural residents are not asked to subsidize growth that primarily benefits the downtown core.

This plan represents an important shift in how the City approaches housing. It acknowledges that not all growth is equal and that the smartest way forward is to build where it makes sense, not just where land is available. Rural Ottawa will always be part of the city’s future, but our focus now should be on improving services, protecting village character, and maintaining the quality of life that residents expect. Urban intensification, not rural expansion, is the key to solving Ottawa’s housing crisis.

By supporting growth where the infrastructure already exists, we can help address housing affordability without compromising the rural way of life that so many of us value.