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.
It’s not a fine, it’s a price.
Just start seizing rentals already.
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?
Society can build things without a profit motive.
Housing should be a human right, so rent abolition is next after expropriation of land leeches.
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.
Not the builders … the developers. There’s a difference.
You mean like construction contractors? Those people either directly or indirectly work for the developers. It’s not speculators and landlords being punished people, it’s people trying to get housing built, in a housing crisis.
Yes, I know that most of the people running the development industry are dead-eyed reptiles doing it for profit, but still: the shit they’re looking to profit from is building homes people live in. Something the government should not be adding extra taxes upon.
Housing really is one of those aspects of the market that needs to be demonetized and handled by governments.
We already got that. Municipal governments have control of the housing market. It’s called “zoning” and their opinion on housing is “no.”
Then buy a bunch of land and incorporate it as a separate county. Or the Canadian equivalent, I don’t know what you guys call it
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?
It’s split between multiple developers and you wouldn’t get 600 units out of that total
It’s especially not worth it for them when you are wasting hours in the day working on that versus working on homes you can sell for over a million
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.
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.
Those jobs would have to pay more to offset the commute. I don’t really see the problem.
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).
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.
No they won’t. They’ll just pay for delivery and carry on.
