Tenant Satisfaction Survey 2024: Building a Community Together

Every two years, CCOC’s Tenant Satisfaction Survey provides an important opportunity for tenants to share their experiences, helping us keep tenant voices central to our decision-making.

This year, we worked hard to make the survey accessible, offering it in English, French, and Arabic and distributing hard copies with prepaid envelopes for easy returns. Tenants could also complete it online, so whether you prefer pen, paper, or pixels, we made sure everyone could participate!

Why the Survey Matters

At CCOC, understanding our tenant community isn’t just a checkbox—it’s fundamental to shaping our service and planning sustainable, inclusive communities. The insights we receive help us shape services and plan improvements and build safe, welcoming spaces that reflect our tenants’ priorities. With inclusivity and equity as core principles, we included some demographic questions to better understand our community’s diversity, guiding us in serving everyone effectively. For more details about the rationale behind these questions, click here.

We’re thrilled by the 709 responses we received—more than we could have hoped for! This response rate underscores our tenants’ commitment to our community. Each response is a valuable piece of the puzzle as we continue our journey of providing affordable, community-driven housing. CCOC’s tenant community is vibrant and varied: 53% identify as women, 28% as part of a racialized group, and 20% as part of the LGBTQ2S+ community. We heard from tenants both new and long-standing, with some residents with us for over 30 years! To thank everyone for their time, we held a draw for five $100 gift cards. 🎉

The Results: What We Heard

The feedback showed an average satisfaction score of 7.6 out of 10—a slight increase from 7.3 in 2022. While overall satisfaction is high, we’re committed to improving in areas that need attention.  In terms of areas for improvement, key themes this year included community safety, cleanliness in laundry and garbage rooms, and service communication. Here’s what we’re doing to address them:

1. Community Safety 🌇

Safety is a priority, and we recognize the challenges some neighborhoods face. Tenants expressed concerns about disruptive activity near our buildings and at certain buildings suggested measures like cameras. Our Board is working with CCOC’s Community Safety Policy to address these issues. Our current policy acknowledges that cameras do not guarantee a safer environment. Currently, three of our buildings have cameras, but challenges persist, so we’re focusing on comprehensive approaches to safety. In line with CCOC’s policy we are making physical changes to the buildings to improve safety, like modifying entrances and introducing keyless entry systems. We also are working with community partners, like City councillors, and Ottawa Public Health to try to address challenges at a neighbourhood level. We will be holding a tenant information session on November 20 at 464 Metcalfe with the team from ANCHOR (211) the new outreach response team in the neighbourhood.

2. Laundry & Garbage Rooms 🚮

Our laundry and garbage rooms serve hundreds of people, so functionality and cleanliness are essential. Tenants raised concerns such as insufficient laundry machines, lack of cleanliness, and inaccessible machines and waste bins. Laundry and garbage facilities vary greatly across our properties, so we’re conducting an audit to identify options for specific improvements. Currently, vent inspections are conducted on an annual basis. We’ll also communicate more on encouraging laundry room etiquette and understanding our shared responsibilities. To improve waste management, we’re working with the City of Ottawa’s green bin initiative to introduce composting and waste diversion in more buildings. We have provided feedback to the City as they roll out green bin initiative that we need support in increasing the accessibility of our garbage rooms.

3. Service Communication 🛠️

We understand that timely service responses matter, and we’re grateful for tenants’ patience as we improve our response system.  We heard that tenants know how to reach us and overall we’re more consistent in answering the phone, but there are still inconsistencies in service timelines, and tenants shared their frustration with frequent cancellations and rescheduling of work. These inconsistencies effect the day to day of tenant lives who stay home or prepare for work to be done. To address this, we’re transitioning to work with different contractors for some services. We hope this will translate to improved experiences for tenants. CCOC is also actively engaged in a review of our tenant-request journey and we are exploring ways to increase efficiencies and improve our internal communications in order to better serve tenants.

In addition to changing how we operate we are integrating your feedback into our communications. We realized we can do a better job of communicating some of our practices and policies and giving tenants access to the information they need. We will follow up in the NewsNotes and our website to address information gaps. We’ll be making some big changes to the website in the next year to make it easier for tenants to make requests and find the information they need! This redesign will include all tenant facing policies being readily available on the website.

Wrapping Up

Each survey gives us new insights, new goals, and a renewed commitment to serving our tenants better. To continue sharing feedback, use our Maintenance Feedback form—when staff or contractors enter your unit, they will leave you with an information card that includes a link to a survey where you can let us know about your experience. We’re grateful to every tenant who trusted us to share their feedback, helping us grow as a community. Together, we’re more than a housing provider—we’re a community, constantly evolving, and we’re excited to see what we can achieve next!

Please contact engagement@ccochousing.org for ongoing survey-related questions.