Opinion: 'Not the City's Job' Isn't the Same as Nothing More to Do on Housing
Editorial: Housing is the county's job, but Owen Sound's mayor shouldn't call worried residents uninformed for questioning housing policy as homelessness grows. The city has tools of its own.
EDITORIAL OPINION
When Grey County council met to discuss its new 10-year housing and homelessness plan on May 28, Owen Sound Mayor Ian Boddy seized the moment to answer his critics. Residents who email him demanding action, he said, are “uninformed.” Some, he noted, have called him “lazy and useless.”
He pointed to the county's decade of work as proof enough is being done, and to cities like Toronto and Ottawa, where he said things look far worse.
“Owen Sound looks pretty damn good,” he told the room.
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On the central point, the mayor is right, and it is worth saying so plainly. Housing and homelessness are the county’s mandate, not the city’s. Under Ontario’s Housing Services Act, Grey County is the designated service manager responsible for funding and running community housing and homelessness programs; Owen Sound does not administer them. The county has taken the work seriously, and the plan it endorsed is a credible one.
But being right about whose mandate it is does not make him right that Owen Sound is a beacon for other municipalities to aspire to, nor that expressing concern is a sign of ignorance.
Start with the figure he leaned on. Higher per-capita spending — a number drawn from a subscription benchmarking study the public cannot see or verify — measures money going in, not results coming out. Spending is the easy thing to count; housing people is the hard thing to do, and the mayor reached for the number that flatters.
Turn that same per-capita lens on the residents, and the comparison stops flattering. The typical Owen Sound household earned $63,200 in 2020, about 30% less than the typical Ontario household at $91,000, according to the 2021 census.
The mayor is holding up dollars spent, in a city where incomes sit well below the provincial norm and the housing waitlist keeps climbing, as a measure of success. But money spent is not the same as need met, least of all in a community with this little to spare.
And the results, laid out by the county's own community services director the same morning, are sobering. The community housing waitlist has nearly tripled since 2020, to 2,545. The average wait has stretched to 4.9 years. Demand is still increasing, the director said, and there is a segment of the homeless population the system simply cannot serve.
A resident who finds that alarming is not uninformed. These are the county's own numbers.
How it looks “in the street” tells a more complicated story than the mayor allows, too.
Owen Sound's Crime Severity Index — Statistics Canada's measure of the volume and seriousness of police-reported crime — was 101.94 in 2024, second-highest among Midwestern Ontario communities and roughly 68% above the provincial figure of 60.7. That was after an 18.8% drop on the year; in 2021 the city ranked eighth-highest in Ontario.
Police Chief Craig Ambrose has fairly noted that a single homicide weighs heavily on the index in a community this size, and that many people involved in violent incidents are not from Owen Sound — that as a regional hub, the city absorbs problems originating across Grey-Bruce.
That context is real. It does not erase a pattern years deep.
And then there is the bar the mayor sets. “Owen Sound looks pretty damn good” — measured against Toronto and Ottawa, the places he says will amaze you with how bad they are.
Set aside that a city of 21,000 was never going to mirror the visible crisis of a metropolis. The deeper problem is the standard itself.
“Better than the worst” is not an achievement; it is stopping short of catastrophe.
Residents are not asking to be measured against the bottom. They are asking the mayor to measure Owen Sound against what their own lives tell them — incomes a third below the provincial average, a crime index well above it, a housing waitlist that has nearly tripled — and to name that as worth working on. They are asking their leaders to listen to and acknowledge the experiences they are having.
Being told to feel fortunate it isn’t worse is not leadership. It is a way of ending the conversation before it starts.
The streetscape the mayor is praising is, in large part, the city's own to manage. Council approves the police budget. The city made the Downtown Improvement Area a committee of council. It runs waste collection and street cleaning — both long-running sources of complaint here. He cannot take the credit and disclaim the responsibility in the same breath.
The leap from "not the city's mandate" to "nothing more the city can do" doesn't hold water, either. Land-use planning is the city's job, and so are real financial levers: development charges, the Community Improvement Plan, the capital facilities bylaw, and city-owned land.
And Owen Sound does reach for them — just this April, council waived roughly $127,000 in building permit fees for St. Clare Place, a 40-unit affordable housing project, on top of the development charges it had already forgiven and a proposed brownfield incentive.
It isn't starting from scratch, either: the city has its own municipal non-profit housing corporation, the Owen Sound Housing Company, which has operated below-market apartments here since the 1980s.
What Owen Sound has mostly declined is to push those tools further.
In 2022, council voted 8-1 against even developing a municipal housing plan — a proposal that had floated tools such as a municipal affordable-housing reserve fund — with members citing the risk of duplicating the county. As recently as last November, housing advocates were still pressing the city to strengthen its planning tools and to pre-zone underused institutional sites, such as churches and former care homes, for housing.
Other lower-tier municipalities have gone further with the same toolkit. In Bruce County, Saugeen Shores adopted a policy to put town-owned land toward affordable housing and is using it on a 30-unit townhouse project — pairing town land, servicing and fee reductions with a Habitat for Humanity partnership.
In Grey County, the Town of The Blue Mountains created a wholly-owned attainable housing corporation and bought the old Foodland site to hand to it for rental housing.
Non-profits are getting creative on financing, too: in Haliburton County, Places for People is funding affordable units by selling community bonds to residents and cottagers.
None of these is a silver bullet, and these are different communities with different means. But together they make one thing clear: a lower-tier municipality is not a bystander, and “we’d only duplicate the county” is a choice, not a limit.
There is a test of this happening on Owen Sound's east side. A community land co-operative, Glassworks, has spent years assembling 46 acres and the member capital to build hundreds of attainable homes.
The catch is that the land is still zoned for industry, and only the city can change that.
Converting employment land is not a decision to take lightly, but it is hardly unheard of: next door in Bruce County, Brockton used a provincial zoning order to move part of a Walkerton business park from employment to residential, designating replacement employment land elsewhere.
And Owen Sound is rewriting its Official Plan and zoning bylaw right now. So the question the mayor's confidence ought to invite is this: with a community group having already brought the land and the capital, and the need still climbing by the county's own count, could the city use that rewrite to make room for the homes — proactively rezoning for housing rather than treating it as someone else's problem to solve?
None of this means Owen Sound is doing nothing. Weeks before the mayor's comments, council stepped up for St. Clare Place — proof the city has real tools and will use them for housing.
That is exactly why "uninformed" misses the point. The disagreement is not about whether the city has a role; it plainly does. It’s about how far the city should go, and that is a debate worth having out loud, not waving away.
The distinction matters most because of who is being brushed aside. The people emailing the mayor are the engaged ones, and telling them they are uninformed sends a message that concern itself is the problem. It isn’t. In a community whose own county calls the crisis growing, public pressure is not noise to be managed. It is what keeps important issues on the agenda.
The plan council endorsed is a good one, and the city’s part in it is real. While he holds the office, the mayor’s job is to represent every constituent, worried ones included. He may think Owen Sound looks “pretty damn good” — but that is no cause to disrespect the residents troubled by a tripling waitlist and by people sleeping outside.
You can see the mayor’s comments in full in the meeting recording:
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Excellent Editorial Miranda!
I do not see homeless people or folks doing drugs in public when I drive through Wiarton, Meaford, Thornbury or Collingwood. So why can't these issues be solved in Owen Sound?