Every live development file in Ottawa, on one spine

The spine

Where every file actually sits

The city publishes 43 distinct status strings. They collapse to 8 process stages, and that mapping is the durable knowledge — it lives in tools/lead-gen/wardwolf_cities.json, as data, so it can be read and argued with. A stage is ordinal, so it is drawn as one hue ramping, never 8 separate colours.

Units are counted only on files that state a number (184 of 433). The rest are real projects with no published count, so every unit figure here is a floor, not an estimate.

The clock

How long a file has been sitting, by stage

The entitlement clock, and the reason a developer cares about this page at all. Each bar is the median age of the files sitting at that stage today.

This is a snapshot, not a cohort. It measures how old the files at a stage are, which is not the same as how long the city takes to move a file through it — that needs the same files followed over time, and the snapshot history to do it is only now accumulating. Stated as a proxy on purpose.

Flow

Filings per month

New applications hitting the register. The last point is the current month and is always partial.

Dated files only: 433 of 433 carry a filing date.

The mix

What is actually being built

Use is read from each file’s own description. Four categories is the ceiling — no set of six categorical colours separates safely, including for a colourblind reader, so a fifth category would have to be earned by merging another.

Classified from the city’s prose, so a file with a thin description falls to residential. Commercial detail is understated here and we say so rather than rounding it away.

Geography

Wards by units in the pipeline

Where the volume is. This is the map’s ranking in one column — useful for deciding which ward is worth a conversation.

3 of 433 files are not placed in a ward and are absent from this chart only. They sit outside every published district boundary we hold — which is a gap in the boundary file, not in the register, so they are counted everywhere else on this page.

Instrument

Which approval each file is asking for

The application type decides which process a file is on and how long it takes.

The register

Every file

Sortable on any column, filterable on anything in the row. This is the whole dataset — the free specimen, not a teaser.

Why we bother

Most of this was always public. Almost none of it was ever read.

The register is open data. Anyone could download it. Nobody does, because 433 files, each with its own status string and its own prose, is not a document a person reads - it is a pile a person gives up on. So the city's own record of what is being built sits unused, and the industry works off announcements instead, which are written by whoever wants the announcement made.

We rebuild this every fortnight. If it is useful, the short version lands in your inbox: the fortnightly read. If you want to argue with a number on this page, that is a conversation worth having — the workings are all here.