10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan refresh - to be released on March 13
The refresh of the 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan will be released on Friday, March 13. It will go to the City’s Joint Planning & Housing and Community Services Committee on March 24, and to City Council on April 8, 2026.
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.
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.
HHLT members will be sharing information and making presentations to their sectors over the coming weeks.
The HHLT co-chairs Kale Brown and Kaite Burkholder Harris will host a webinar on Monday, March 16 from 1 pm to 2 pm to provide an overview of the refreshed Plan.
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.
2025 Point-in-time Count results released
Every year the City is required to conduct a Point-in-time (PiT) Count to measure the number of individuals experiencing homelessness. The PiT Count has two deliverables, an enumeration, which is the count of individuals experiencing homelessness, and a survey, which collects additional information on the individuals’ demographics and barriers to housing. The comprehensive survey is collected every three years, last done in 2024, while the enumeration is to be done every year.
The outcomes of the City’s 2025 PiT Count enumeration of individuals experiencing homelessness were released last month. In collaboration with the Housing and Homelessness Leadership Table (HHLT) and sector partners, this data will support the development of our detailed workplan to support our 10-year Housing and Homelessness plan.
The enumeration was conducted through targeted outreach across the city from noon on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, to noon on Wednesday, October 22, 2025. The results of the 2025 PiT Count enumeration, along with past PiT Counts can be found at PiT Count – Point-in-Time Count | City of Ottawa.
