The 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan is Ottawa’s roadmap for ensuring that everyone in our city has a safe, affordable, and stable place to call home. Under provincial legislation, the City is required to maintain this plan and refresh it every five years to reflect changing realities, new data, and evolving community priorities.
In 2025, the HHLT and its 10-Year Plan Working Group met regularly to:
- Develop consensus on the guiding principles, priorities, goals, and outcomes of the plan;
- Review available indicators and identify gaps in data;
- Map the system and determine where alignment is most needed; and
- Design strategies for sector engagement.
City staff and members of the HHLT worked closely to ensure the Plan reflects both legislative requirements and the lived realities of the community. This included integrating feedback from sector engagements held in spring and fall 2025, and specific engagement with people with lived and living experience of homelessness.
The refreshed Plan will go to the City’s Joint Planning & Housing and Community Services Committee on March 24, and to City Council for approval on April 8, 2026.
A message from the HHLT as we prepare to launch the refreshed Plan
The HHLT gives us all a new way of working together.
As we prepare to launch the refreshed Plan, we need to acknowledge reality: it’s been a very hard winter, and people are struggling right now. The work we are doing is urgent.
We are all parts of an interconnected system. No one organization, sector or government has all of the resources or responsibility to achieve the goals of the Plan.
People’s needs don’t exist in silos, and our work can’t either. We need a holistic approach.
We acknowledge that certain demographics and populations face systemic challenges, and that equity must guide us in prioritizing resources.
The 10-Year Plan is so high-level that it may be hard to see your organization or your clients in it. The Plan relies on everyone. Boards, leaders, front line staff and clients all have a role to play in the Plan’s success. We urge you to have strategic conversations about how your work connects into the Plan and how we can work together.
Working together is hard. We need to build / rebuild trust, to develop / redevelop relationships. We all have a shared accountability to achieving our shared goals.
Progress is already happening: projects like shelter diversion, ending youth homelessness, scaling supportive housing, are in development or underway.
We’re much more together than the sum of our parts. Stay in touch / stay involved, and help this important work succeed.
Values
Collaboration, Accountability, Right to Housing, Equity and Inclusion, Indigenous Leadership
Approach
Co-design, Lived Experience Leadership, Systems-based approach, Data-driven, Nimble
Read the reports from the sector engagement sessions here:
Engage with leadership across the sector on priorities and solutions.
Finalize the framework that will guide housing and homelessness strategies for the next five years.
Strengthen our collective voice to influence policy and investment decisions.
Engagement with people with lived experience
The Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa’s Expert Steering Team (EST) was engaged to design a structured, ethical, and sustainable engagement approach to integrating the perspectives of PWLE. This work was grounded in the understanding that meaningful systems change depends on centring the voices of those most affected.
This report outlines how the EST, in collaboration with the HHLT, engaged people with lived and living experience of homelessness as part of the Plan refresh. This work fulfills the legislative requirement to demonstrate meaningful engagement with lived expertise in developing and updating the 10 Year Plan. Beyond meeting the requirement, this work highlights the ongoing commitment of the EST, the Alliance, and the HHLT in centring co-design and shared leadership
in systems design.