The pipeline · Ottawa
Ottawa's longest wait comes after the approval, not before it
A file sits a median nine months while the city decides. It sits sixteen and a half months after the city has said yes. Twelve thousand homes are in that second queue.
Everybody who complains about how long it takes to build in this city is complaining about the approval. Council, consultation, the committee, the delegations — the part with a meeting in it.
That part is the faster half.
Nine months to the decision. Sixteen and a half after it
Ottawa's register gives every live file a status, and those statuses sort into the city's own stages. Group the 433 files by the site they are about — 333 sites — put each site at the furthest stage any of its files has reached, and measure from its most recent filing:
| Where the site is | Sites | Median months since its last filing |
|---|---|---|
| Still being decided | 143 | 9.0 |
| Already approved | 120 | 16.6 |
Those are the same kind of number measured the same way, and the second one is nearly twice the first.
Break the second open and it gets worse. The single longest-waiting stage in the whole register is Agreement / legal clearance — the site is approved, the by-law is in force, and what remains is the subdivision agreement, the securities, the conditions, the lawyers. Sixty-four sites are sitting there. Their median is 19.9 months.
| Stage | Sites | Homes | Median months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circulation / comments | 51 | 12,111 | 7.7 |
| Submission / completeness | 36 | 3,890 | 8.0 |
| Pre-application | 56 | 4,575 | 11.4 |
| By-law in force | 56 | 6,849 | 13.5 |
| Decision | 43 | 2,421 | 13.7 |
| Appeal | 14 | 7,101 | 15.3 |
| Agreement / legal clearance | 64 | 5,151 | 19.9 |
What is actually sitting there
These are not marginal files. The longest-waiting approved sites in Ottawa today:
| Site | Months since its last filing | Homes | On the file |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2506 Innes Rd | 27.2 | 44 | Concorde Properties |
| 280 Laurier Ave | 27.0 | 18 | 280 Laurier Holding Inc |
| 788 March Rd | 26.7 | 196 | SINA |
| 398 Roosevelt Ave | 26.0 | 61 | ML Westboro Inc |
| 609 Longfields Dr | 25.9 | 90 | Campanale Homes |
| 1452 Hunt Club Rd | 25.8 | 176 | Larga Baffin Ltd |
| 1330 Avenue K | 25.4 | 483 | 25 Pickering Holding Inc |
Twelve thousand homes are in the post-approval queue. They have their permission. Nothing about them is contested any more.
Which half of that is the city's fault
We do not know, and the register cannot tell us. This is the honest limit of the reading.
A site at Agreement / legal clearance is waiting on some mixture of two things: the city processing an agreement, and the applicant satisfying conditions — posting securities, closing financing, finalising engineering. A developer who has decided to hold rather than start looks identical in the register to one who is stuck behind a clerk. Both of them show as a date that has not moved.
What the register does establish is where to look. Any argument about Ottawa's speed that stops at the approval is arguing about the nine-month half and ignoring the sixteen-month one. If you want the pipeline to move, the queue with twelve thousand homes in it is the one after the yes.
And there is a reason nobody looks there: the approval has a meeting, a date and an agenda, so it is visible. The clearance queue has none of those. It is just a file that stops changing.
Why the ages are measured this way
Two choices, both of which move the numbers, so both are stated rather than buried.
A site is aged from its most recent filing, not its first. A site that filed a rezoning in 2024 and a site plan in 2026 has been in the system for two years, but it moved four months ago. Ageing it from 2024 would count it as stalled when it is active — and the stalled/active distinction is the entire point of the measurement.
A site sits at its furthest-advanced file. One project routinely carries several applications at once, and the one that has got furthest is the one that describes where the project is.
Change either rule and these tables change. That is why they are written down.