Ottawa Election 2026: Matthew Luloff , Orléans East-Cumberland Ward

Um, what is the single biggest reason housing costs so much in your ward and what would you do about it in your first year in council?

Hey, there's, there's a lot of, uh, contributing factors, uh, but there are some things that are within the city's control.

The value of the dollar kind of drops over time.

So ensuring that we have timely approvals, uh, and that we're not throwing in a lot of like studies back and forth.

So like somebody comes in with a proposal, city staff need to be clear on what's required to move that forward because the back and forth costs time and costs money.

Now, I want to make sure that we're not cutting community consultation out of that discussion as well.

So early community consultation is really, really important so that a project hasn't moved so far along that the community only gets a say at the end.

I think that a lot of developers and a lot of people in the housing industry are really keen to hear what the community has to say.

And so that needs to happen earlier.

So things like, Before an application is deemed complete, um having you know five or six time volleys back and forth so like they say okay you need to do a slope stability study you need to do an environmental study and you need to do a soil study okay so they go back and do that they provide that and they're ready to move forward and they say oh also you need to do this this this and this and so like this it goes back and forth back and forth that that only that doesn't just make the project more expensive But it also makes it take more time, which hinders our ability to be able to meet our housing goals.

And so cutting that time would make a really, really big difference.

Obviously, interest rates being where they're at, a lot of times a project will get to complete, and then they have to wait for the right financials to make sense before they can move forward.

But the city can do a lot of things, uh, to ensure, um, that it's not costing more time and more money and we can be more efficient,

I believe.

Um, Ottawa has committed to more homes inside existing neighborhoods.

Where in your ward should new density go? And maybe more importantly for some people, where shouldn't it go?

Yeah, no, great question.

And we have this discussion a lot and I'm sure you do, especially with suburban councillors, right? We've done this work already.

We commissioned the Orleans Economic Corridor Study Back in, I think it was like 2019, Steve Willis, who was the chief of planning for the city of Ottawa at the time, said, hey, listen, we want to do a secondary plan that's underneath the official plan that kind of guides development in the area.

And he said, we want to redevelop Plaster Orleans.

And I said, okay, well, that makes a lot of sense.

There's a lot of land there.

I think that it could be used a little bit better.

rather than having sprawling parking.

And plus, we've got a new LRT station opening up there, right? And I thought, this is a really good opportunity for us to talk more holistically about the area surrounding the new LRT.