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.
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?
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.
Quotes from Developer Nicola Padulo:
“If people can’t afford it, they should not live in the city. The city is made for the privileged.”
He says the city wants to “put its nose” in his business.
I’d love to see the privileged try to live in a city devoid of any service workers.
My city is kinda like that. Stores have no checkouts open, fast food is bad and takes forever, and restaurants are never as good in other towns
They cry anytime affordable housing pops up yet don’t understand why no one is around to stock the grocery store
I love this point because they really don’t understand that if you put all the minimum wage employees 3 hours away from the city then they will need to drive 3 hours to get groceries
It’s not just out of touch rich assholes who think this. I have so many friends that love to say people who work at don’t deserve to live in any city and should get a real job. The most ironic part is non of them know how to cook and rely on fast food for the majority of their meals.
People making under the median household income are the ones who keep the city functioning and they deserve to live in the city more than someone making 300k a year.
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.
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.
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?
If it’s less painful to pay the tax than to do the right thing, then the tax isn’t high enough. Keep doubling it until it works, and in the meantime, use the tax revenue for the city to use as low-income housing.
