Two years after Valérie Plante’s administration said a new housing bylaw would lead to the construction of 600 new social housing units per year, the city hasn’t seen a single one.
The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet.
If they don’t, they must pay a fine or hand over land, buildings or individual units for the city to turn into affordable or social housing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet.
If they don’t, they must pay a fine or hand over land, buildings or individual units for the city to turn into affordable or social housing.
According to data released by Ensemble Montréal, the city’s official opposition, and reviewed by CBC News, there have been 150 new projects by private developers, creating a total of 7,100 housing units, since the bylaw came into effect in April 2021.
Benoit Dorais, vice-chair of Montreal’s executive committee and the member responsible for housing, said the two-year review would be ready this fall, despite being promised this spring.
He says Montreal isn’t a good city for investing in property: construction costs are high, there’s too much regulation, and developers like him seek as much profit as possible.
AccèsLogis, the province’s social housing fund, has only enough money to complete projects already in the works, and the Quebec government said last winter that it will be replaced with a program more attractive to private developers.
The original article contains 829 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
From the article: “Those fees have so far amounted to a total of $24.5 million — not enough to develop a single social housing project, according to housing experts.”
I don’t know about construction costs in Canada, but in many cities in the United States, 24 million dollars could renovate at least 120 homes, assuming a cost of $200,000 per renovation. Renovation is more expensive than building new. You could easily build 240 modest homes on undeveloped land with 24 million dollars.
I’ve left them half a million for administrative costs.
Due to the climate, houses need more isolation and heating that the typical US house. This leads to stricter regulations on house construction, which causes construction prices to rise even more…
Removing our reducing these regulations would simply allow promoters to botch the job without reducing price… So we’re stuck with these prices but have houses that keep us warm in the winter.
It’s Montreal, not Ice Station Zebra. $24m Canadian isn’t enough to build warm housing of any size?
Houses are not ‘affordable housing’ and definitely are not housing projects. Medium size apartment building can easily have 100 apartments. That’s $240.000 per apartment which would be considered ‘affordable’ where I live. I’m guessing in Montreal it’s more expensive so yeah, they don’t even have money for 100 apartments which would be a small housing project.
Sounds to me like the fines need to be bigger.
Seriously. Everybody keeps their family home. Anybody with income earning property gets that turned over to the state to be converted into affordable state run family housing to give the market a reasonable floor and get more people able to own their own family home
So, like, if you reduced the number of rentals and made it uneconomical to build rentals, would you expect the cost of rent to go up or down?
Why do governments (not just Montreal) seem intent on creating affordable housing in very expensive areas? Surely the effective price of having that housing there could buy a lot more housing somewhere where housing is less expensive. So maybe this outcome is the best one? Perhaps (and I’m making these numbers up) a developer would rather pay a tax of $500,000 than add one unit of affordable housing, and then that $500,000 can be used to buy two units of affordable housing somewhere else where property is cheaper.
Becauae if you concentrate all your social housing in one “cheap” area, you end up with a ghetto
It doesn’t have to be concentrated in one area, it just has to be anywhere but the expensive city center.
It’s the same reason that homeless people are typically found in inner city areas, and not poorer suburbs. There are little to no amenities in poorer suburbs, amenities exist in more established and inner city suburbs.
I know of thee reasons:
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Affordable housing needs to be near services and work, otherwise transit costs make the housing unaffordable. Some affordable housing in Matagimi isn’t helping, even if it’s free. The attractiveness of those services and work make the locations valuable.
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It’s not just luxury and affordable a city is trying to achieve, they ideally want all ranges of housing affordability mixed together everywhere. This mixture reduces segregation and promotes positive socioeconomic outcomes.
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The bottom up push for affordable housing (at least in Montréal) is coming from areas undergoing gentrification. So the citizen push isn’t to stick affordable housing in very expensive areas, it’s to not have affordable housing removed when the very expensive housing comes to them (Montréal examples of Verdun, Griffintown, and PSC). So your example of scraping one affordable unit to build two elsewhere still displaces an existing family/residents.
A healthy city needs socioeconomic diversity. Not that long ago Montreal was known for cheap CoL allowing people of all walks of life to thrive. Putting aside the artists, students, and general eccentrics that contribute to the vibrant life of the city, we have to consider where the hell are our minimum wage workers going to live. I seriously don’t understand how places like Vancouver do it. Does every coffee shop, fast food, retail etc worker commute 3hrs each way? What about the teachers, nurses, garbage collectors? Or do they all get paid way more and everything just costs a lot more?
There’s a compromise possible and despite being a major city without lots of undeveloped land, there is still plenty of space reasonably close to the city where high density affordable housing could be. Doesn’t have to be prime real estate right downtown. There just needs to be social will and courage to stand by the conviction that this is something good for the city. The truth is that like someone else said, the fine is too low and developers just see it as the cost of doing business.
New Vancouverite here, previously from Montreal. The answer is that it’s fucked. 1bdrm hitting 3k a month and 2bdrm is about 3800. I can’t imagine how service works are surviving. Min wage is 16.75/hr but living wages are mathed out to about 25/hr and even that would be hard.
Salaries seem to be generally lower since it’s beautiful and has mild winters. I’m not sure how long we’ll stay if things don’t get better soon. Sadly local politics are NIMBY friendly and not doing anything useful. In fact they just reduced the vacant home tax…because people weren’t reporting it on their taxes voluntarily.
It’s too bad because we found dream jobs in specialized fields here, the only other real option is Toronto (ugh, no) or the US (hard no).
Imagine if only rich people lived in the city center and everyone who lives on a minimum or with a low wage over 1h away by public transportation.
Do you think people would want to travel that long for a minimum wage job in the stores, restaurants and cafés of the city center? I know I wouldn’t.
We need to have social mixicity and affordable housing everywhere to accommodate the people who do the work of keeping these commerces working.
Right now downtown Montréal is on life support. Because of this. Commerces are closing everywhere.
Wow. Why shouldn’t people of all economic classes have a place that’s close to all the amenities and conveniences that cities offer? Why should they have to travel from outside the city for an hour to work, or school, or for entertainment? Why would you advocate for creating ghettos? Why shouldn’t someone who works 40 hours a week at a
They will add this fine to the price of the apartments. It should be really simple: certain % of the units have to be social housing or you will not get building permit, period.
Yes, this is a prime example of why the neoliberal fascination with only acting on the market indirectly with tax/fee incentives instead of just making legal requirements or directly creating the goods and/or services the government wants is so foolish.
The neoliberal approach here would be just to tax people and if government wants to have affordable housing units they should just buy them like anybody else. Not create this ridiculous approach where we put a drag on home-building during a home-building-shortage.
It’s insane - IZ basically lets the landlords and comfortably landed gentry ignore the housing crisis while their home values climb, and meanwhile expects the builders to provide affordable housing gratis while they’re also providing market housing for people who aren’t poor-enough to qualify for something subsidized. It’s completely backwards.
I’m sure there’s a high enough fine that would make it more financially advantageous to build social housing, but there’s also the problem of these developers be willing to take a hit on their very hefty profit margins if that means maintaining a “brand”, so I’d wager policymakers underestimated the effective fine value by a factor of 10 at least.
