May 1, 2026 Newsletter

This week at the Community Services Committee, I introduced a motion calling for better data tools to support the City's response to encampments. The Committee also approved a significant new strategy to help families experiencing homelessness move more quickly into stable housing. Together, these two developments reflect a growing and coordinated effort at City Hall to address homelessness in a more effective, transparent, and humane way.

As warmer weather arrives, encampments become more visible across Ottawa's neighbourhoods. Residents have questions, concerns arise, and ward offices field a rising volume of service requests. To respond effectively and to communicate clearly with residents and community organizations, Councillors need timely, accurate, and consolidated information about what is happening on the ground and what the City is doing about it.

The challenge is that while City departments collect encampment data, they do not consistently consolidate or proactively share it with ward Councillors. Historical reporting has been uneven, and staff noted that the manual effort required to compile and distribute this information makes regular reporting difficult to sustain.

My motion, to be considered at the next Committee meeting, calls on relevant City departments to develop a standardized reporting framework integrated with the data systems being built through the City's Unsheltered Homelessness Outreach Model. The framework would give Councillors and community organizations transparent, timely access to aggregated encampment data through public-facing dashboards, while protecting the privacy of individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Staff would report back to Committee and Council by Q4 with a proposed framework, implementation timelines, and any privacy or data governance considerations.

When ward Councillors have access to reliable, real-time data, we can respond more quickly to resident concerns, coordinate response more effectively with community partners, and have more informed conversations with the public about the supports available to people experiencing homelessness.

The need for those conversations has never been greater. The numbers tell a difficult story: as of March 1, more than 660 families, including over 1,220 children, were experiencing homelessness in Ottawa. Families are now the largest group experiencing homelessness in our city, and demand continues to grow. On average, families spend 11 months in the shelter system, and roughly three-quarters of them live in overflow locations such as hotels and motels rather than in dedicated transitional housing. Long, uncertain stays disrupt children's schooling, strain caregivers, and make it significantly harder for families to rebuild stable lives.

To address this, the Committee this week approved "Pathways to Housing: Ottawa's Family Homelessness Strategy", a new coordinated approach designed to move families out of temporary shelter and into safe, long-term housing as quickly as possible.

The strategy is built around four core areas. It begins with prevention, helping families stay housed in the first place through early supports such as emergency financial assistance and help understanding legal and tenant rights. Where families do enter the shelter system, emergency and transitional placements will be treated as a brief waypoint rather than a destination, with dedicated case-management support to help families secure permanent housing as rapidly as possible. The strategy also works to open clearer pathways into social housing, portable housing benefits, and family-sized affordable units. It also calls for housing, health, gender-based violence services, settlement supports, and community organizations to work in a more integrated way, so families encounter fewer gaps on their path to stability.

There is also a strong fiscal argument for getting this right. In 2025 alone, the City spent $29.3 million on hotel and motel placements for families experiencing homelessness. The new strategy is designed to reduce that reliance on costly temporary arrangements and shorten the overall length of shelter stays, easing pressure on both families and the municipal budget. As a concrete early step, the City has set a new target: 20 per cent of new City-funded affordable housing units with two or more bedrooms will first be offered to families experiencing homelessness.

The Committee also approved updates to the City's local priority rules for rent-geared-to-income housing, where rent is calculated based on household income. With more than 16,000 households on the waiting list and average wait times of five to eight years, it is essential that the rules directing who receives priority are fair, clear, and current. The approved changes strengthen eligibility rules for households experiencing homelessness, improve support for tenants who face a sudden loss of income, and bring greater consistency to the unit selection process. Both the family homelessness strategy and the priority rule updates will go before City Council on Wednesday, May 13 for final consideration.

It is important to note that underpinning all of these efforts is Ottawa's comprehensive, human rights-informed approach to unsheltered homelessness and encampments. Rather than treating encampments solely as bylaw or enforcement matters, the City's approach recognizes that people living unsheltered are rights-bearing individuals who are entitled to dignity, safety, and access to services. This means that outreach and engagement come before enforcement, that individuals are connected to shelter, housing, and health supports wherever possible, and that any actions taken with respect to encampments are carried out in a manner that is transparent, proportionate, and respectful of the people involved. The goal is not simply to move people along, but to help them move forward into stable and supported lives.

There is also encouraging news on the community safety front. The City of Ottawa is expanding its Alternate Neighbourhood Crisis Response program, known as ANCHOR, to include Overbrook, with the expansion scheduled to take effect at the end of June 2026. The program deploys teams of trained community workers who provide immediate support, crisis de-escalation, and referrals to appropriate services, reducing the need for police involvement in mental health and social crises. City Council approved $700,000 in the 2026 budget to support this expansion, which includes new staff to manage the increased geographical coverage. Since its launch in 2024, ANCHOR has operated in Centretown and subsequently expanded to areas like Hintonburg, resolving more than 92 per cent of calls without police involvement. The program is delivered in partnership with community health centres, including the Centretown Community Health Centre and Somerset West Community Health Centre, and its strong track record is what is driving this continued growth into new neighbourhoods like Overbrook.

Addressing homelessness in all its forms, whether families in overflow hotels or individuals living in encampments, requires long-term thinking, cross-sector collaboration, and a commitment to making sure every resident of Ottawa has a safe place to call home. The work approved this week is an important step in that direction. It is equally important to be clear-eyed about the limits of what municipalities can accomplish on their own. Ottawa's family homelessness system is under significant strain not because the City has failed to act, but because many of the most critical tools needed to address it, including housing benefits, social housing supply, and gender-based violence shelter capacity, are controlled by provincial and federal governments and are not keeping pace with growing need. The City of Ottawa can lead, coordinate, and innovate, but lasting solutions to homelessness will require senior levels of government to step up, invest, and work alongside municipalities as true partners in this effort.

Rawlson King 
City Councillor