Ottawa needs to triple its housing starts. Toronto needs 50%.

CMHC published its Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report on Thursday. There is a table in it that should have led the local news here, and did not.

The table

CMHC models two numbers for every major market. The first is business as usual, meaning the annual housing starts you get if current trends hold. The second is the annual starts it would take to put affordability back where it was in 2019 by the year 2036. The difference between them is the gap.

Ottawa's business as usual is 11,000 starts a year. The requirement is 33,000 to 38,000. The gap is 22,000 to 27,000 homes a year, every year, for a decade.

Now read Toronto. Business as usual 42,000. Requirement 62,000 to 68,000. Gap 20,000 to 26,000.

Toronto's baseline is roughly four times ours and its shortfall is smaller than ours.

In proportional terms it is worse than that. Toronto has to lift its building rate by about half. Ottawa has to roughly triple.

The rest of the table, for scale. Vancouver is short 5,000 to 7,000 starts a year. Calgary 4,000 to 5,000. Edmonton has no measurable gap at all. Montreal, the only major market in worse shape than Ottawa, is short 42,000 to 56,000. Nationally the shortfall is 187,000 to 238,000 homes a year against a requirement of 417,000 to 469,000.

Ours widened. Toronto's narrowed. The reason is the part worth reading.

CMHC compares this year's estimate against last year's, and the direction is not the same everywhere. Toronto and Calgary narrowed. Vancouver held. Ottawa and Montreal widened.

The stated reasons run one line each. Toronto's gap narrowed "as lower home prices improved affordability." Ottawa's widened because affordability deteriorated, driven by higher mortgage rates and slower income growth.

Be precise about what that does and does not say. It does not say Ottawa prices ran up. They did not. It says the cost of carrying an Ottawa home rose faster than Ottawa incomes did, and local prices held roughly flat through it. Toronto absorbed the same rate increase and the same wage stagnation, and Toronto prices fell far enough to more than cover both.

Which puts the year in an uncomfortable light. Ottawa sellers have spent 2026 holding the line on price. They are not cutting, they are cancelling the listing instead, and the benchmark has barely moved. In CMHC's model, a benchmark that holds while financing costs climb is not a market holding steady. It is a market getting less affordable slowly.

Ottawa is building plenty. It is building the wrong tenure.

None of this is a story about a city that stopped building.

Housing starts per 10,000 people in the first half of 2026: Ottawa 37, Toronto 19. We are starting homes at nearly double Toronto's per capita rate. Units under construction here are at an all-time high. Completions in the first half ran 22% above last year. CMHC says Ottawa holds one of the largest pending-start inventories in the country.

Now the composition. Rental units were 54% of Ottawa housing starts in 2026. Condominium apartments were 12%. Rental made up 64% of completions and 69% of everything currently under construction, up from 53% a year ago and 30% in 2023.

Year over year, rental apartment starts rose 3%. Condominium apartment starts fell 49%.

CMHC's explanation for the condo side is blunt and it is correct. A new downtown condominium can cost roughly what a suburban townhouse costs, and the townhouse is much larger. Add presales that will not hit their thresholds and financing that will not clear, and the project never starts.

So Ottawa is producing renters' housing at a record pace and has nearly stopped producing owners' housing. I wrote in August about completions outrunning starts. This is the tenure version of the same problem, and it is the more serious one.

How a city has too many homes for sale and not enough homes

This sounds like a contradiction. It takes about ten seconds to resolve.

Ottawa finished August with 4,496 active listings, the highest August count since 2016, 4.5 months of inventory, and about 1,300 listings that left the market without selling. Ottawa Centre by itself was carrying seven months of supply.

And CMHC says the city is 22,000 to 27,000 starts a year short.

Both are true because they count different things. Active listings count what is for sale at the prices sellers are asking today. CMHC's gap counts how many homes would need to exist before an ordinary Ottawa income could carry an ordinary Ottawa home the way it could in 2019.

A stack of unsold homes priced above what people earn, and a shortage of homes priced at what people earn, are not two markets. That is one market, described from each end.

What to do with it

If you are listing, do not read "Ottawa is 27,000 homes a year short" as a floor under your price. You are not in the shortage. You are in the 4,496. The shortage is of housing that does not exist yet at prices this city can carry, and a finished three-bedroom in an established subdivision is not that.

If you are buying, watch the ownership pipeline rather than the headline. Condominium starts down 49%, ground-oriented starts near multi-decade lows, 69% of everything under construction rental. That is not a reason to overpay this month. It is a reason to stop assuming this much ownership selection is permanent. I made the condo argument in August and the supply data has moved further in its direction since.

If you are counting on policy to fix it, temper that. CMHC names two Ottawa supports, the Development Charge Reduction Program and the new city-wide by-law permitting four units as of right. I have run the arithmetic on both. Development charges work out to roughly $36 a foot, and four units requires 500 square metres of lot that most Ottawa lots do not have. CMHC's own wording is that these measures "should help support long-term supply growth." Long-term is carrying that sentence.

The short version

Ottawa starts homes at twice Toronto's per-person rate and has the larger shortfall. Not because the city stopped building. Because almost everything it builds is rental, ownership construction has nearly stopped, and the price of the ownership stock already standing did not move while the cost of financing it did.

Want to know whether your place sits in the surplus or the shortage? That is a fifteen-minute call and a straight answer. 613-262-6545 or fil@613realtor.ca. Or go look at what is sitting and work it out yourself.