The Official Opposition at Montreal City Hall is urging Valérie Plante’s administration to release a million dollars to help organizations rent a hundred affordable housing units in order to reduce the number of tenants who will find themselves on the streets this year on the margin of July 1.
The Ensemble Montréal party will table a motion to this effect during the next meeting of the municipal council, scheduled for next Monday. Concretely, the opposition party wants to ensure that community groups have sufficient financial security to rent a hundred rental units offered below the average market price. These would then be turned over to tenants in need over the next few months. This would be a one-year pilot project.
“What we want is for community groups to be able to rent housing themselves, offered at an attractive price with the intention of eventually selling it to a homeless family”, explained the spokesperson for Wednesday. Together Montreal on homelessness, Benoit Langevin, during a virtual press conference.
Since these are rental units that are already available, such a measure would not have the effect of reducing the housing vacancy rate in the metropolis, but Ensemble Montréal asserts that it would contribute to reducing the number of tenants who find themselves on the street on the sidelines of July 1, the traditional moving day in Quebec. These number in the hundreds each year, in Montreal as elsewhere in the province, at a time when the Quebec real estate market is in full swing.
“The reality is that we are not all equal when it comes to the rental market. Do we take it away from someone who would have more skills to do their own housing search and finally give it to a community group which, in turn, helps someone who would have more difficulty to find accommodation at a decent price? For us, it’s a form of balancing against the market, where many people have difficulty finding housing” that meets their ability to pay argued Mr. Langevin.
According to data from the Office municipal de l’habitation de Montréal (OMHM) quoted by Ensemble Montréal, there are still 16 households today still housed in a hotel at the expense of the City, for lack of having or to have been referred to date to accommodation of sufficient size to meet their financial capacity. “We have to find another solution, it’s a matter of human dignity,” insists Benoit Langevin, who therefore considers the listing and storage services currently offered by the City to tenants in need to be insufficient.
The elected municipal official is therefore asking the City to work this month with community groups to create this rental housing bank and thus “prevent emergencies in anticipation of July 1”. These units would also be reserved for tenants in need who are not eligible for the Rent Supplement Program, he said.
The Welcome Hall Mission supports
Ensemble Montréal’s proposal has the support of the President and CEO of the Welcome Hall Mission, Sam Watts, who is one of the main experts in Montreal on the issue of homelessness. During this virtual press conference, Mr. Watts stressed the importance of this housing bank comprising units of different sizes distributed in the different boroughs of the metropolis to prevent households from having to leave their neighborhood to find an affordable apartment. .
“We shouldn’t wait to find ourselves in the middle of an emergency. We can avoid having to respond to emergencies by working together and upstream,” he said.
Some landlords, however, may be reluctant to assign the lease of their housing to community organizations, at a time when rents are rising sharply. “It is the law that applies. The owner always has the right to refuse if he has reasons [sérieux] to refuse and we move on to the next one, ”replied Mr. Langevin, when questioned on this subject.
At the time these lines were written, the office of the mayoress of Montreal, Valérie Plante, had not reacted to this motion, which will be debated next week.