Affordable Montreal? This is the question that an event taking place from May 19 to 28 at the Center de design de l’UQAM aims to explore. As its name suggests, it focuses on economic housing affordability, and specifically in Montreal. But the most worrying component of the title remains its enormous question mark: historically affordable for modest people, will our city still be so in five years? In ten years ?
Several lights are red, and even “blinking dark red”: uncontrolled rise in real estate values and excessive pressure on rents, inflation of construction costs and delay in new construction, diversion of the rental mission towards tourist accommodation and underfunding of community housing, state disengagement and its corollary: the impunity of the speculative market.
Every week in Montreal, the media multiplies the reports where long-time tenants face renovitions. Added to this dangerous cocktail is an underestimated phenomenon: the collapse of the traditional convivial tenure for which small landlords — who, for seven decades, were the first providers of affordable housing — are now struggling to find a successor.
Every problem feeds another
The first losers are obviously the tenants. Those with low incomes can no longer find accommodation at a normal budget; those who earn a little more see their dream of home ownership slipping away, and therefore persist in occupying the still affordable rental units that the youngest or newcomers would need. In turn, these ever-increasing numbers of poorly housed people lengthen the waiting lists for community housing (coops or housing NPOs), which struggle to maintain the maintenance of their buildings. And publicly owned social housing is unable to accommodate the many households in difficulty.
And concern is growing even among rental unit owners. We are not talking here about speculators – these (very) short-term investors in the face of which the authorities are outrageously passive –, but about these dozens of small landlords each holding less than twenty homes… who still form the majority of the half-million rental housing in Montreal! After thirty years of balancing daily operating costs with affordability of rents, many of them are less than enthusiastic about the idea, at the time of retirement, of selling to vulgar renovictors. Will their “old-fashioned landlord” practice soon disappear?
The urgency of consultation
Against this current disorder – as much as to reverse the sad trend of sending low-income households to the periphery – consultation is urgently needed between the players in the real estate market, one of the rare economic sectors where it is almost non-existent. Abandoned to speculation, this crucial segment of our society no longer meets expectations, unlike previous decades, when the profitability of private investments did not exclude economic affordability.
Facing the emergency, affordable Montreal? is betting on bringing together housing stakeholders from different backgrounds over three days: tenant and landlord associations, housing co-ops and financial institutions, housing NPOs and university faculties. To identify at least some elements of solutions: suggestions from private owners, large or small cooperative groups, successful conversions of industrial sites, or even audacious cases of urban reappropriation.
The program begins with an exhibition of historical examples of affordable housing (Montreal and international) and the presentation of projects carried out in partnership between the School of Design and the community sector. This will then be followed by a guided tour of Habitations Jeanne-Mance — this complex of 800 social housing units in the city center, historically the most ambitious project in Quebec. Everything will culminate in a Study Day beginning with presentations of different points of view, but leading to exchanges with the participants.
Because in this city mainly “of tenants”, isn’t the general public the first concerned?