Claire Brownell's List: Ottawa affordable housing

• With over 9,500 households on the waiting list for social housing, the waiting time can be over five years – depending on the size of your household.

• That will help get the 10,000 families on the social housing waiting list into homes.

• Because no new low-cost rental housing has been built for years, the waiting list of 10,000 families has stayed more or less static. If a family gets placed it's only because another family has moved out.
• Alliance to End Homelessness,
• Watson said he will propose to spend $14 million a year on homelessness and social housing with the money coming from two principal sources: Funds that will be freed up from the province uploading $23 million of social services charges, and from the capital budget.

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• “Every year for the last several years we’ve housed about 1,800-2,000 households from the waiting list,” Solvason-Wiebe said, but in 2009 the registry accepted nearly 5,000 new applications.

    

  “Guess what? You’re creating an ongoing demand.”

• Every month registry staff receive 450-500 new applications.

    

  Solvason-Wiebe, who also chairs the Ottawa Social Housing Network, said her staff tell people there is a four- to eight-year waiting period for those on the list.

    

  In some areas of the city the wait can be up to 12 years.