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Ottawa's new 10-year homelessness plan won't last that long | Opinion

Brigitte Pellerin: The city has had three different decade-long plans since 2014. So far it's going great — except for reducing homelessness.

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Friends, citizens, fellow taxpayers, folks. Meet the new 10-year plan to end homelessness. It’s just like the old 10-year plan but more confusing. Also? Weren’t we already in the middle of the previous plan? What do all these changes mean, beyond “haha, try to hold us accountable for anything now, joke’s on you”? Let’s find out.

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I may have dislocated an eyeball reading the press release, which was mainly about how representative and diverse the Housing and Homelessness Leadership Table is. I like diversity. It’s necessary. And if it actually housed people, I’d swallow my snark and move along. Alas, all we get is enlightened governance and 10-year plans that don’t last half a decade.

As it turns out, the province is the one mandating the weird bit of Orwellian central planning that states every municipality must have a 10-year plan. It’s in the Housing Services Act, 2011. Specifically, regulation 367/11 and you’re welcome.

So Ottawa had a 2014-2024 plan, which got replaced by the 2020-2030 plan, which is now being replaced with the 2026-2036 plan. If you’re good at math, you’ll notice how each “10-year” plan lasts about five years and no, the next one won’t last a decade either.

If you’re as annoyed by this as I am, vote a different colour next provincial election.

The outgoing five-year 10-year plan came with a genuinely ambitious set of goals. Here they are, because you deserve to feel something before I tell you how it went.

The list included the creation of between 5,700 and 8,500 affordable housing options (new units and subsidies) targeted to low- and moderate-income households, 10 per cent of all new units created must be new supportive housing, while another 10 per cent has to be new accessible housing. There is also a goal of preserving existing community housing supply, eliminating unsheltered homelessness (that’d be living on the street for those of us who use plain language), reduce chronic homelessness by 100 per cent, overall homelessness by 25 per cent, Indigenous homelessness by 25 per cent, new people entering homelessness by 25 per cent and people returning to homelessness also reduced by 25 per cent.

According to the 2024 progress report into the five-year 10-year plan, we were mostly on track for the number of new affordable housing options, supportive and accessible new units. We were doing alright on targeting new units to moderate-income folks and not losing community housing units. I didn’t see anything about unsheltered homelessness except people are getting support (not defined), and we failed horrendously on targeting new units to low-income folks, on new people entering homelessness (up significantly instead of down by 25 per cent), on chronic and overall homelessness (ditto).

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So, to oversimplify things, our homelessness strategy is going great — except for reducing homelessness.

Enter a new 10-year “plan refresh” that does not include specific measurable outcomes, only aspirational ones such as “Housing system coordination is increased to support transitions to different housing options.” See you in 2031, when nobody can be held accountable for anything.

To be fair, there are genuinely good things in the new plan. Affordable housing is now defined based on people’s income rather than market conditions. That’s excellent. We will now incorporate the advice of people with lived experience. And the plan commits to creating a public data dashboard for tracking progress, which people who work in the space tell me is a meaningful step towards data honesty.

Every time we update our plans and strategies, we improve on all sorts of metrics except for the only one that should matter; people who have no home. If we’re going to devote this much energy to ending homelessness, let’s make sure that whatever progress is accomplished be on the only key performance indicator we should care about, the human one.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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