Q&A: Jason Burrggraaf talks housing supply, zoning and red tape — and what we can do to fix it

Mayor Mark Stucliffe kicked off 2026 with a promise to address Ottawa’ critical housing shortage by “cutting red tape”, and council followed with the approval of a new zoning bylaw that aims to clear the way for more housing development. There is still plenty of work to be done, local homebuilders say, but these moves are steps in the right direction.

At a mayor’s breakfast with GOHBA held on Jan. 8, 2026, Sutcliffe outlined his plans to get shovels in the ground for new properties by cutting red tape and streamlining administrative processes for project approvals. This will include eliminating some of the studies that are required by developers prior to having a project approved, and addressing a shortage of supply that is contributing to housing affordability.

City council has also just approved a monumental zoning bylaw that claims to clear the way for housing intensification and more efficient homebuilding processes.

The Lookout sat down with Jason Burggraaf, director of the Greater Ottawa Home Builders Association (GOHBA), to learn more about housing supply, zoning, the role the city plays in promoting home building, and whether the city’s most recent promises will make an impact.

Jason Burggraaf: Housing is a very heavily regulated thing in terms of production, right from the application process and the studies you have to produce, building codes, getting those inspected, up to everything else. There are a lot of consumer safety and important reasons for a number of those pieces, but it does have the impact of slowing down housing production and increasing costs because things are taking time to process. That all contributes to housing affordability, or the lack thereof, and housing supply overall.

Every federal, provincial, and municipal level has its jurisdiction within housing, and they all have their fingers in the pie in various ways. So what we're trying to do is have every level recognize the most essential things that they need and what can be cut down in order to increase that supply and decrease the amount of time it takes to process. Because ultimately that's what will get housing supply moving the fastest. 

There's such a time gap. Especially if you're talking about a mid- or a high-rise, or you're talking about a subdivision, you're talking several years between the time you say ‘we're going to build this’ to the point where you actually even put it to market, and so many things can kind of change in that interim. The more we can kind of squeeze down that timeframe, the better off everyone is, and the cheaper, or at least the more affordable, that housing will end up being. 

For the municipality in particular, a lot of it focuses on what kind of technical studies we don’t need to ask for anymore, and which ones can kind of be scoped down to just the essentials.

The mayor spoke about cutting 13 studies from more than 50. You're cutting out a lot of studies that the province has signalled they want municipalities to cut down anyway. They're going to scope some other studies of what you might need to actually ask for. Again, the idea is that you can produce the answers to those studies faster, and just accept everything as kind of a complete application. 

The next step of the city’s Housing Innovation Task Force and its recommendations looked at the entire sequence of the application process. What gets asked for? Who looks at it? How many times can they look at it? Before, you could be in this cycle of constant questions, answers, more questions. You enter what they call the circulation period with the city, where you've got your application, you've got all your studies and stuff, it gets circulated to infrastructure and parks, trees and everything else. They provide questions. You answer all the questions, or say you're going to fulfill whatever conditions they add on to it, and that gets recirculated again. 

The word ‘culture’ comes up a lot, and it's really a focus on empowering city staff in the Planning Department, especially to make decisions, or to orient themselves to say, ‘what is it that we need to do to try to get to yes’, or, ‘what are the things we can do to work together to get to yes on a project’, as opposed to just defaulting to ‘No’? 

There’s a lot to do with risk assessment and risk management by the city, based on what liabilities are part of the application process. The city is exploring what they are truly responsible for and whether their engineers have to review plans that are done by other professional engineers who have stamps. There's a reason why professional accreditations exist.

That's actually one of the things that just came up last week from the province. The Ontario government has said that if they've got their plan stamped by a professional engineer, that's sufficient now to move ahead with the application, as opposed to the city paying an engineer themselves to relook and recertify everything, even though you can't technically sign off on someone else's professional right accreditation. 

Essentially, you're not having to devote time and money to consultants and time to lead those studies. The first chunk in the application process is that you put all your papers together and all your documentation to give it to the city for them to deem it complete — that’s the terminology. 

Typically, you'll have a pre-consultation discussion with planning staff, and they'll ask for this or that study, whether it’s noise, wind, geotechnical… And there are any number of ones, depending on kind of where you are. The more studies they ask for, the more time and money it takes for you to produce those studies and fulfill those conditions. 

It goes back again to the risk management piece and the change in culture if someone on the planning file doesn't feel empowered to make decisions or move it ahead. 

We're slowly addressing that. The pendulum for risk management has kind of gone too far one way, so we want to get it to a reasonable spot. If you cut a bunch of those studies, and there’s less money you've spent upfront, all of that cuts down on the amount of time and money that goes into it.

Supply is ultimately the thing that improves affordability the most. I think even when you have people kind of push back on that argument, inevitably, what comes forward is they're just thinking about what kind of supply, who's building it and who's owning and operating it after the fact. It's just a matter of whether we’re talking about supply for transitional housing, for deeply affordable housing, for rental housing, or supply for the  private market with private ownership, private rental. 

There needs to be a supply in every segment of what we call the housing continuum, right from emergency shelters all the way to private ownership. The biggest issue — and it's not just Ottawa, it's across the province, across the country — is that we need more supply in every single one of those. 

It’s all of those things. There's a bit of a disconnect between the planning for housing as sort of a societal good, and the actual construction of it, which is more market-based.

The supply is so dictated by market forces like consumer confidence and the economics of the area. Was there a tech bubble, crash, or interest rates? How many students do you have coming in? Are you in a big college or university town like Ottawa? It's the demographics of it all, too.

We have a good idea of how many homes we need for our growing population and the kind of mix of homes that we want to see to accommodate those. But we can't just produce 15,000 homes a year just because that's what the demographics say we need. It's subject to a lot of market forces that virtually no one actually has significant control over.

The municipality doesn't have control over things like interest rates, but neither do builders have control over the number of people who come to a showroom or a lot of the financing that you need.

Absolutely. It’s a long process.

The Official Plan conceives so much external growth, in terms of the urban boundary, and intensification along major corridors and connected to transit hubs. We need to translate those objectives in terms of our housing and where we want to see it built.

Now, the zoning is there to allow that to happen so you don't have to go through even more hoops and more permissions to build that kind of housing that the city tells you it aspires to actually build. So if the city sets the goal, the city has got to ensure that its own rules allow you to build that kind of density. 

The bylaw has things like adjustments to heights and the number of units approved for housing buildings to achieve the city's goal of densification in each kind of neighbourhood in and around LRT and transit, and then the new kind of communities. 

It goes back to planning. So they say there will be approximately 400,000 people who are going to move to Ottawa by 2046, and that means we need 195,000 new homes, which would be around 2.2 people per house, and they want 45,000 to be in existing neighbourhoods and around LRT stations and major corridors. That's mostly going to be apartments right around LRT stations.

Then another 80,000 could be built in a new community built because people still want low-rise, single-family, townhomes, those sorts of things. If this is the goal, the city has to make sure that its zoning permits that sort of work. 

They are also reducing parking minimums and just letting the market kind of decide. We're not going to demand that. If you're building a 12-unit apartment building, we're not going to demand that you build 18 parking stalls; the developer can decide, in the idea that we will eventually transform into a much more transit-oriented city where you won't need that car at all. 

There are a number of pieces kind of like that, so we're slowly changing what the zoning does and providing for more housing that way/

It really is. The neighbourhood portion, where there could be a lot of intensification. Is huge. There are good neighbourhoods with access to transit, good amenities, shopping, community pools and everything else. Your neighbourhood is great for a reason. Other people want to live there too, for those same reasons. 

And if you can encourage, if you're able to kind of get that density in your neighbourhoods, you kind of keep all those amenities going. For example, the neighbourhood gets old and these kids move away, and they don't have a new influx of kids. That school ends up closing. So you kind of need this kind of turnover in neighbourhoods a little in order to keep all those things together. 

That subsequently is better for the city to get more people demanding transit and those services right there.

I've spoken with others, and kind of cautioned that the things that are happening at the municipal level aren’t going to all of a sudden create a huge burst of construction. 

But what it does do is it sets us up so that when the market does get hot again — because housing is always kind of cyclical, and we're kind of still in a low part of the market right now. — and people come back and start buying homes, and they feel confident and jump back into the market, all the permissions will be in place for us to scale up that construction activity.

It's a good opportunity, when you're in a low part of the market, to tweak everything that you have jurisdiction over, so that when it comes back online, and things really start going gangbusters, we’re good to go. 

That's why it's critical to do these things now, even if we don't see an immediate increase next week on housing activity.

Definitely the homebuyer rebate, which has been a long time on the books. Everyone's kind of sitting on the sidelines for that, and it still hasn't been enacted. Hopefully, it'll happen within the next couple of weeks.

It would have been much better to see it spread out to all new construction or all new homes, as opposed to just for first-time buyers, simply because the amount of first-time buyers who buy brand new homes as their first home is a small contingent; most of us buy resale homes as our as our first home, because they tend to have been more affordable. 

The idea behind that is getting people to be able to kind of move in that housing continuum, as I mentioned.

I always frame things as with my 93-year-old neighbour. She's in a house meant for a family of four or five, like mine. But she's by herself, her husband passed two years ago, and she doesn't have anywhere to kind of move to.

We tend to cluster all our smaller living on arterial streets and busy corridors, but she wants to stay in a quieter neighbourhood setting. So if the zoning now allows you to build two or three smaller units in a similarly sized building, but it gives her a smaller footprint, still in an acquired neighbourhood…If she had that option and could get the GST off that construction, she’s actually helping get it built, which allows her to move into an option she finds suitable and frees up her family-sized house for a growing family.

That’s where the zoning and the financial aspects of it tie themselves together. And if we can kind of get that situation entwined for people like my neighbour.

There are so many things that get into the weeds. But just as much as it looks like my job is to represent home builders and the overall residential construction industry and consolidate their voice to City Hall, ultimately, our goal is just good public policy around housing that allows builders to build right, allows the industry to build overall, while achieving the goals that the city sets for itself. We just want to get us to enough housing for Ottawa and its population, which is only going to continue to grow over the next 25 years.