Sparking innovation: How good evidence and co-design can result in better service

Much of what local government does is administer something the province decided. Funding formulas, eligibility rules, priority frameworks: set at a distance, handed down, and left for the local government to make work for the person standing in front of it. How well that goes depends less on what the province allows than on whether the local government goes looking for a better way to do it inside those rules, or just applies them as written and calls it done.

Centralized Waiting Lists for housing are an administrative nightmare

The centralized waiting list for social housing is a good place to see this. Under Ontario's Housing Services Act, the province requires designated municipal service managers to establish, maintain, and administer a single centralized waiting list for rent-geared-to-income and community housing across their service area, and it sets the income and asset thresholds they must use to screen applicants and determine ongoing eligibility. That responsibility produces a long first-come-first-served line, one that municipal staff still have to maintain, reviewing every applicant's eligibility on a cycle that runs a year or two for as long as they stay on it.

That line gets very long. When my team studied the waiting list for a regional government in Ontario, the applicants we interviewed had been waiting an average of seven and a half years, some as long as fourteen. Toronto's list grew from roughly 75,000 households in 2019 to nearly 93,000 by 2024. At that scale, first come first served stops meaning very much on its own, and simply maintaining the line, verifying and reverifying tens of thousands of files that barely move, becomes a real drain on limited local staff and resources.

Reducing administrative burden can still put citizens first

We worked with a regional government to look at new ways to manage the waitlist. In my research for this post, I found someone who is currently doing comparative analysis in Ontario of how Service Managers are managing their waitlist, a good reminder that this is still very much a live question, not one any region has solved and moved past. Our own work started the same way: comparative analysis, speaking with other service managers, a jurisdictional review of how other communities were managing the same pressure, and a thorough round of engagement with the people actually on the waiting list. That research gave us the basis to co-design a new approach, one built to put the needs of the people waiting first while still finding real efficiencies.

The co-design workshop was run as a design thinking exercise with applicants and frontline staff working through the research together, not staff alone and not applicants alone. The workshop was where the research actually turned into ideas the region could use, rather than a report that told them what everyone already suspected.

Co-design built on good policy research resulted in better service design

The regional government we worked with treated the wait itself, not just the eventual allocation, as the problem worth solving. Rather than build a better queue, they built a single intake process that connects every applicant, whatever their priority level, to the supports that could actually help them while they waited: income assistance, childcare, employment help, legal services, health and settlement supports, coordinated through one point of contact instead of leaving people to find their own way through separate systems. That shift, from administering a line to actively supporting the people standing in it, was the real efficiency gain: less time spent on process for its own sake, more of it spent connecting people to something useful.

One idea that came up during the research was New York's approach to allocating affordable housing by lottery. At the time, a straight lottery sat outside how Ontario's priority-based rules for allocating this kind of housing were built to work, but for a line this long, where years of seniority barely move someone up it, it looked like a fairer way to decide who gets a unit next. Years later, Toronto has moved part of its own list to something similar, a reminder that sometimes innovation takes time to implement.

Innovation doesn't come from a policy desk

Local governments manage a lot of pressure with limited resources, and the rules they are handed rarely resolve that pressure on their own. They are the level of government who hear citizen complaints the loudest and are often not the ones who put the barriers there to begin with. What actually determines how well residents are served is bringing all the tools together, what citizens want, what has worked elsewhere, and what makes sense for our community. This doesn't come from a policy desk. This comes from co-design and the freedom to think outside the box.