Ben Woodfinden: Ottawa, the government town that learned to build 

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe during a city council meeting at Ottawa City Hall, June 10, 2026. Photo by Jean Levac/Ottawa Citizen Photo by Jean Levac /Jean Levac

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Nobody thinks of Ottawa as a city that builds things, quite the opposite. It is a government town, known nationally for producing reports rather than buildings, the sort of place a Torontonian pictures as a low grey skyline surrounding a committee room. So it might surprise you to learn that in recent years the City of Ottawa has been leading the way in solving one of the biggest challenges facing cities and Canadian policymakers: namely getting homes built.

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Ottawa recorded 9,524 housing starts in 2025, a 38 per cent increase over the year before, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The province went the other way: starts across Ontario fell 13 per cent to 62,561, the worst year since Doug Ford promised 1.5 million homes in the 2022 campaign, and Ontario was one of only three provinces to lose ground in a year when the country as a whole gained. Toronto fell 44 per cent. Which means Ottawa, the second-largest city in Ontario, came within a thousand homes of matching Toronto’s total (10,561) while housing roughly a third as many people.

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Part of why Ottawa’s record on this is so encouraging is because of some of the fundamental reforms the city has introduced to make it easier to build and approve housing. But to be clear, last year’s starts came before many of these reforms, so Ottawa was in fact building on an already positive record.

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The reforms are the bet on the next cycle, and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe made it from a position of strength. In theory, he could have just left it there, but to his credit he went further and decided to build on this to try and really fix the housing problem that Ottawa, like virtually all our cities, faces.

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The Housing Acceleration Plan has 58 action items and 53 per cent of them were finished within six months, with 78 per cent promised by next year. The measures are almost aggressively unglamorous. Development charges deferred to occupancy rather than collected upfront, which matters because a builder otherwise pays interest on a bill against revenue that does not exist yet. Thirteen mandatory studies scrapped outright (wind studies, shadow analyses) and thirteen more narrowed. Community benefit charges cut. It might not sound particularly inspiring, but put these sorts of reforms together and you can fundamentally change the way cities, and builders, can get to work building homes.

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The city also, importantly, changed zoning by-laws, which are the most obvious but often difficult problems to address. The zoning by-law, passed unanimously on Jan. 28, replaced a rulebook that had been in place for 18 years. Four units on every serviced residential lot, one more than the province’s own floor under Bill 23. Three storeys nearly everywhere. Parking minimums abolished across the urban and suburban city. This last change did generate resistance and pushback, but the city pushed through, and the laws now in place should make a significant difference. It won’t please every purist and housing policy wonk, but they are substantive changes that, most importantly, actually got passed and became law.