2 days ago
City warns of surge in homeless population by 2035
A city report says that Ottawa's homeless population could surge by almost 60 per cent over the next decade without substantial investments in affordable housing.
The city released its housing needs assessment on Friday. Its modelling estimates that, under a business-as-usual scenario, Ottawa could have a total of 14,734 people experiencing homelessness annually by 2035. That's up from 9,326 currently.
Those figures represent people who enter a homeless shelter at any time during the year, rather than the number of people who are homeless at a specific point in time.
The point-in-time number, collected every four years through a citywide count, reached 2,952 in October 2024 — 78.5 per cent higher than in 2018.
Friday's report lays out the pressures that are driving people into homelessness. The city's population is growing, and more of those people are from vulnerable groups like renters, single parents and fixed-income seniors.
Housing costs are growing faster than wages, creating an affordability gap. The waiting list for rent-geared-to-income units has swelled beyond 15,000, leaving people waiting years for affordable housing.
"These are provincial and national trends, and they're going to intensify," said Jesse Donaldson, executive vice president of HelpSeeker Technologies, which performed the modelling for the city.
"The extent to which the housing pressures will continue and escalate over the coming years — next year, five, 10 years — is so significant that it requires a proportional response."
City needs help to fund thousands of housing units
To keep up with those pressures, the report estimates that the city will have to add almost 129,000 new housing units over the next decade.
More than 10,550 of those units should be affordable, provided through a combination of supportive, transitional and public housing, as well as rent subsidies.
If that happens, the model predicts that people would exit homelessness more quickly than others would lose housing, so the number of homeless people would eventually drop to near zero.
The city does not have an estimate of how much that will cost. That will come later, through an update to the city's 10-year housing and homelessness plan.
But Kale Brown, the city's interim director of housing and homelessness services, said the figure is sufficiently high that there's little chance the city can handle the cost on its own.
"We would certainly need more sustained and significant funding from senior levels of government," he said.
The federal government has already pledged $176 million to Ottawa over three years through its housing accelerator fund.
Brown said the cost of not acting — and adding thousands of homeless people to shelters or encampments — is far greater.
"We would anticipate much larger costs on emergency services, hospital services, that kind of thing," he said. "It is imperative that we do the cheaper solution over the long term."
The report draws from a long list of data sources, including the city's point-in-time count of the homeless population, as well as statistics from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the census.
Here are some of the key data points and findings for Ottawa:
Ottawa is projected to have about 118,000 more households by 2035.
Renters are expected to make up about 43 per cent of all households by 2035, up from about 36 per cent in 2021.
The median monthly rent has increased 61.3 per cent from 2014 to 2024.
Household incomes have grown more slowly, rising 46.4 per cent from 2006 to 2021.
The percentage of renter households paying $2,000 or more per month increased from 1.3 per cent in 2006 to 17.1 per cent in 2021.
23 per cent of renter households live in housing that is unaffordable, unsuitable or inadequate.
The vacancy rate for affordable rental units is substantially lower than high-rent housing; for units affordable to the lowest income households, the rate is effectively zero.
Social assistance rates remain far below market rents.
The waiting list of rent-geared-to-income housing has grown 36.8 per cent from 2022 to 2024, reaching 15,140 households in December 2024.
The average wait varies between 4.2 years and 7.6 years, depending on the number of people in the household and whether they have children.
