(Quebec) Municipalities and opposition parties are denouncing the Quebec government’s decision to bury the AccèsLogis social housing construction program. They estimate that a simple administrative degreasing would have made it more effective.
“We don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. The program suffered from acute procedurality, but the substance was good and it still is, ”laments in an interview the president of the Union of Quebec municipalities and mayor of Gaspé, Daniel Côté.
Mr. Côté reacted to an exit from the Minister responsible for Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, who confirmed the end of AccèsLogis in an interview with The Press. She deplored “the slowness” of the program, and pointed the finger at the promoters of social housing projects for delays of “five, six or seven years before the first shovelful of earth”. “Hundreds of millions” are today “frozen” without anything moving on the ground, she lamented. His government is under pressure, since it promised in 2018 to build 14,000 social housing units and more than 9,000 are missing to reach this target.
Instead, it will rely on the Quebec Affordable Housing Program (PHAQ), launched a year ago, which will officially take over when Quebec has finished financing a good part of the 6,652 housing units that are still in the AccèsLogis pipeline.
But Mayor Daniel Côté does not share the Minister’s analysis. Rather, he believes that the delays in the program were caused by the delay in getting approval from the authorities. “Every delay causes delays. And when a project falls behind, it costs more because of construction inflation. We must therefore start the application again,” explained Mr. Côté.
Degreasing
He said he was surprised by the minister’s decision. “The last discussions we had, we thought we were heading towards a program overhaul. We hadn’t understood that we were throwing AccèsLogis in the trash to replace it with the PHAQ. We wanted a degreasing. Social housing, but with less bureaucracy,” he explained. He cites as an example the “administrative degreasing”, which Mathieu Lacombe did at the Ministry of the Family and which allows the Legault government to create places in daycare centers more quickly.
Mr. Côté also criticizes the CHAP, which costs municipalities more. “Theoretically the down payment is 20% of the total costs for the cities. In real life we are talking about 40% more, because there is a package of ineligible costs, ”he said.
He also pleads for the construction of social housing, and not just affordable housing, to continue, a similar message carried by the opposition parties.
“It is the definitive abandonment of social housing in Quebec”
“It is the definitive abandonment of social housing in Quebec”, denounces the deputy of Quebec solidaire Andrés Fontecilla. “AccèsLogis was already on artificial respirator, and there they disconnect the device”. He believes that the Legault government is making a serious mistake.
“The cost of social housing is based on the tenants’ ability to pay, while affordable housing is tied to the market price, and will be much higher regardless of the ability of low-income households to pay,” laments he.
Same story with the Liberal Party. MP Virginie Dufour believes that the Legault government has never tried to find solutions to the management problems of AccèsLogis. “Affordable housing is less and less affordable. It goes up with the market. If the market shows 30%, it will go up 30%. This is not the case with social housing, based on the person’s income. We need both affordable housing and social housing. There were improvements needed that might have been possible,” she says.
Parti Québécois Joël Arseneau will “judge the tree by its fruits” but is very skeptical of the government’s strategy. With a very large down payment requested from the communities, he thinks that the new government program will also have difficulty in getting projects off the ground.