Montreal still takes very little action against owners of buildings left vacant or poorly maintained, either through negligence or for speculative purposes. Is the Montreal administration using all the levers at its disposal to counter the deterioration of housing at a time when housing needs are becoming acute? First of two texts.
On Rue Saint-Timothée, at the corner of Rue Ontario, a stone’s throw from the bus terminal, a typical Montreal grey stone building has been lying abandoned for decades. The oldest images listed by Google Street View indicate that the building was already in an advanced state of abandonment in 2007.
According to data from the Ville-Marie borough, this four-story building built around 1875 has not had water or electricity for at least a decade. The wooden fence surrounding it is used as a support for advertising posters.
Not far away, another abandoned residential building, also more than a century old, collapsed on rue Saint-Christophe on November 11, 2022. Over the previous year, the building had been the target of incidents, including a fire deemed suspicious by the authorities, reported Le Montreal Journal.
The owner, Ramzi Sobh, is the same man who bought the building on the corner of Saint-Timothée and Ontario streets from Marcel Hubert Taillefer last April for $810,000. The building has remained vacant since then.
“It’s hell,” said Chloe Trujillo, a tenant in the neighboring building, who fears that the rat infestation she noticed on the back patio of her apartment could be linked to the uninhabited building.
What, in a case like this, prevents a City from acting to ensure that the public domain is not disfigured by ruined buildings?
24 fines in total
In October 2023, new regulatory provisions on the maintenance and upkeep of buildings came into force in Montreal. A few months earlier, Robert Beaudry, head of urban planning on the executive committee, assured in a press conference that these measures would have “teeth” and that the City would “apply them.” Under these new rules, owners of vacant buildings were required, in 2024, to “mandatory register their building with the City.”
A registration form was supposed to be available online for this purpose: it remains untraceable. In an email, the City specifies that “the effective date of this provision is expected by the end of the year.” From then on, “owners of vacant buildings will be required to register their building with the City via a registration form that will be published by the City of Montreal,” it adds.
The City also indicates that it has issued 24 tickets totaling $32,101 since the adoption of this by-law 10 months ago.
“The primary purpose of the regulation is to ensure the maintenance of buildings and the correction of problematic situations,” adds the municipal administration. It thus states that “the statements of offence cannot alone be used to measure the interventions made in terms of occupation and maintenance of buildings” since, “in the majority of cases,” the corrections requested by inspectors are made by the owners before a fine has to be issued.
Without water or electricity
This new regulation also provides that owners of unused buildings must also demonstrate that they are minimally heated and secured to avoid damage during the winter.
In 2022, the Ville-Marie borough alone had 41 vacant buildings that were not served with water and electricity. This number has not decreased in a decade. Added to this number were 42 other buildings that, in this same borough alone, were unoccupied but still served by public services.
The situation is not much better in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, where the municipal administration has identified some sixty vacant buildings. They can be viewed on an interactive map. For the moment, the other Montreal boroughs have not made their data on the issue accessible online.
A real estate goldmine
Across the metropolitan area, the City estimates that there are approximately 800 abandoned buildings under its authority. Not to mention the buildings left in a sometimes very advanced state of deterioration.
These unloved buildings represent a tiny fraction of the 509,328 buildings listed on the island of Montreal. But they are still a sore spot on many of the city’s arteries, while representing a shortage of apartments in the midst of a housing crisis. However, in the eyes of some owners, these vacant buildings are a gold mine that continues to increase in value even as their condition deteriorates. So why invest money to bring them back to life?
“The big dilemma is that in recent years there has been a sharp increase in land values and often the building is undervalued and the land is overvalued,” explains architect Ron Rayside of Rayside Labossière. “So for some, it’s an incentive to let the building deteriorate, because the buyer is acquiring the land and not the building.”
Maintenance, a question of safety
Under the package of regulatory measures adopted by Montreal at the end of October 2023, the exterior envelope of all buildings — “for example, a cornice, a terrace, a balcony, stairs, a gutter, etc.” — must be maintained in good condition. The same goes for exterior elements: roof, walls, foundation, mortar joints, doors and windows must be preserved in the common interest.
Fines are planned. For heritage buildings, it could cost up to $250,000 to rebellious owners.
“Even if these seem like very high amounts, when we have projects worth several tens of millions of dollars that could be built on these lands, fines of this magnitude are not the end of the world,” explains Gérard Beaudet, professor of urban planning at the University of Montreal.
In several areas of Montreal, he explains, changes to urban planning have increased land values. The potential for development, particularly in high-rise areas, has become greater. In this way, “the City creates extremely favourable conditions for owners to seek considerable added value” by letting their buildings deteriorate in order to resell their land years later or to build a new building once the old one has been demolished due to its advanced obsolescence.
These vacant buildings, in addition to depriving tenants of potential housing, can represent a significant fire safety risk for the buildings surrounding them, notes Mr. Beaudet.
A five-unit building on Papineau Avenue that was destroyed by fire in May 2022 is still abandoned two years later, with its windows boarded up and its façade charred. The owner has not received any notice of deterioration from the City for this building located in Ville-Marie, which also has no water or electricity service even though it was occupied by tenants just a few years ago.
When passing the Duty Last Friday, the building stood out among the posh condominiums built around it. Through one of the few unboarded windows, one could see the collapsed roof inside the ruined building, behind which a tent had been set up by a homeless person. One of the building’s back doors was open.
“It’s dangerous for fire, illegal occupancy and the social drama that can happen in vacant buildings,” Rayside said. “Why isn’t the city doing something about it? I have no idea.”
“A bad money shot” for the owners
The bylaw adopted by the City is not the only tool that Montreal can rely on. Several sections of the Land Use Planning and Development Act can be used to prevent a building from ending up in a situation of abandonment, explains Charles Breton-Demeule, professor of municipal law at the Université du Québec en Outaouais.
Since its adoption in 1979, this law has allowed municipalities to take action against a building whose state of disrepair is such that it represents a danger to citizens or has lost half of its value, due to its dilapidation or for other reasons. The Superior Court may, at the request of a municipality, “order the execution of the work required to ensure the safety of persons or, if there is no other useful remedy, the demolition of the building.”
However, even resorting to such measures is to the advantage of the owners, argues Professor Gérard Beaudet. They make “a nasty money grab” when they are expropriated by the City, which must then give the owner a sum equivalent to the market value of the expropriated property. “It’s quite odious to see that owners, who have quasi-criminal behavior in some cases, end up pocketing a windfall at the end of it all,” he says.
The City of Montreal also has a right of pre-emption, which gives it priority to purchase a building when it is put up for sale. In recent years, it sent such a notice to the owner of a vacant 11-unit building on Clark Street in Chinatown, a building that has continued to deteriorate over the past decade. But since the building is not for sale, it continues to languish in endless agony.
Read tomorrow: Dilapidated buildings and owners determined not to move