The way of the cross of social housing

Finally, we will start building on the site of the old Blue Bonnets racecourse! It’s not too early when you know that the last horse galloped there in 2009!

The City of Montreal announced Monday that it is preparing to launch a call for projects for the construction of 200 social and affordable housing units by 2025.

This is excellent news in a context where these housing units, which are sorely lacking, are one of the keys to solving the housing crisis!

But it is also the beginning of a long ordeal for community housing organizations.

All the players in the community will tell you that building social, community or affordable housing in Quebec is a real way of the cross. There is such complexity in the programs that a cat would not find her young there.

We have already written here that the Quebec Affordable Housing Program (PHAQ), created last winter to replace AccèsLogis, needed to be improved. But that’s not the only problem.

The reality is that all of the funding programs are not aligned. It is therefore impossible to knock on just one door to develop a non-profit real estate project.

To succeed in a financial package, you have to “stack the programs”, we are told. Sometimes you also have to knock on the door of a private foundation to make ends meet.

Even worse: some programs have conflicting requirements. And so many steps that it takes forever to get to the end of the process. In short, it’s cumbersome, it’s opaque, and community groups waste a lot of their precious energy filling out pages and pages of forms, not to mention going back and forth between each technical step.

These delays waste valuable time for community promoters who have to compete with the private market to acquire land. By the time they receive the green light and the coveted land has been sold.

We have to go faster.

The idea is not to make the criteria disappear or to distribute the money without counting.

But we have to find ways to make life easier for organizations that want to build this type of housing.

Could the Société d’habitation du Québec (SHQ), whose responsibility it is to coordinate housing programs, become a one-stop shop where promoters submit their projects? This is an avenue to be seriously explored.

The SHQ should also ensure that the normative framework as well as all the criteria of its programs (it manages about twenty of them) are harmonized and up to date in order to avoid unnecessary administrative delays. This is currently the case.

As we said from the outset, the issue of social, community and affordable housing is at the heart of the housing crisis we are currently experiencing. The Vivre en ville organization is precisely proposing an ambitious crisis exit plan, presented today, which aims in particular to build tens of thousands of social and affordable housing units within five years. How ? By offering competitive advantages to non-profit projects, by developing distinct mortgage products for housing co-ops and land trusts, and by allowing municipalities to operate a housing stock, as in Europe. These ideas deserve to be debated during the major housing summit to be held on Friday, at the initiative of the mayoress of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, and the mayor of Laval, Stéphane Boyer.

One thing is certain, we need more social and affordable housing. And for that, it is necessary to facilitate the life of those who wish to build them.