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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That's stupid. Outsourcing to private just doesn't work. Tax their money and build with it instead of making intermediates that will only take more money for them.
They were stupid to give the developers an out. It's not hard to do some math and figure out what it would take to recoup the penalty in rent or sales compared to the much lower revenue stream of affordable housing.
Now the fine is just part of the cost of doing business. They'll either eat the fine, or more likely spread it out across whatever they were gonna charge for whatever they're building instead of the affordable housing.
You can't give greedy assholes an inch, or they'll take a mile and then bill you for it.
Fines are just the cost of doing business. Fines should be a percentage of gross revenue and at a significant rate. Until then corporations will continue to pay the fine and laugh to the bank.
Developers are the sleaziest slimmest sub-human peices of shit you will ever meet. I used to work in the industry, they are all the same. You could fine them half of the net revenue, and they would still pay the fine over doing anything to help society. It is so lucrative the fine would have to be absolutely enormous to make them not just pay the fine. The fine doesn't really matter anyways because everything is done in credit leveraged against previous projects.
Making for-profit private organizations do not-for-profit work will never work. They'll either find a way to get around it, or just not do it in the first place.
Won't be surprised if we suddenly see a host of new 4842 square feet projects, or maybe joint projects between multiple companies (all probably owned by the same guy) that split ownership so that nobody builds more than 4842 square feet on a single plot of land.
Or alternatively they'll just hand over useless land somewhere else in exchange for building that massive high value condo or something.
The only way to make affordable housing is to either rely on not-for-profit organizations, or the government to do it themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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This has always been ridiculous. This kind of Inclusionary Zoning doesn't apply to detached homes, only to highrise condos - that is, to small units that are for many people how they're entering the housing market. Expecting builders to cover affordable housing raises costs for those buyers.
I firmly support affordable housing developments, but expecting housing for those most unable to afford it to be funded by the second-most-unable is insanity. Every other social project is funded by taxpayers, but somehow in a housing crisis where we've a massive shortage of housing, we expect to shove a boat-anchor onto the costs of the very people we expect to solve the crisis and let them bear the cost? That's lunacy.