We don’t build for 5 years, but for 100 years

With Bill 31 on housing, the Quebec government wants to give cities exceptional power to allow them to suspend their own urban planning regulations and thus adopt projects more quickly. The government is targeting the wrong target and playing with fire.

When a crisis arises, the industry always takes the opportunity to demand reforms which, in another context, would never have been accepted, reforms which, in fact, are often also beside the point (this is not not to brag, but I told you that a year ago!¹).

Examples ?

To request relief from municipal regulations, much was made of the 34% increase on average, between 2018 and 2023, in the time it takes to obtain a building permit in Montreal. Horrible, isn’t it? Please note, this 34% means that it takes, on average, 60 days instead of 45 to obtain a permit in Montreal. Do you really believe that these 15 additional days have an effect on the housing crisis? We dramatize the weaknesses of our institutions and give ammunition to those who challenge them.

Still to ask for relief from municipal regulations, we denounce the “not in my backyard”. Each case makes for a good show and we talk about it a lot. However, two years ago, 68,000 housing units were built in Quebec. How many cases of footsteps in my yard? Fifty ? Hundred ? No one knows. We navigate by impressions (which is a problem – researchers note).

And how many projects submitted and accepted respected the regulations? Thousands. We know that. And how many projects have been significantly improved because developers feared a referendum? Thousands. We know it too. But none of them gets an article in the newspaper.

A zoning regulation is the legal transcription of a vision for a neighborhood (types of businesses, types of housing, height, etc.). Multiplying exceptions weakens this overall plan. Citizen checks and balances – like referendums – and regulations exist because shoddy projects, without vision, poorly placed, ugly, too high or too low, are legion. Citizen mobilizations allow us to avoid errors with which we would have to live for a long time. We do not build for 5 years, but for 100 years. Once again, we dramatize the weaknesses of institutions and forget their advantages.

Instead of improvising a perilous general rule, the government could have proposed a mechanism so that cities could quickly modify their zoning regulations to increase density in certain strategic areas, such as around public transit stations, after a consultation process. The developers would thus have been able to build as of right, thus avoiding the multiplication of public assemblies, the risk of favoritism would have been less great and the overall vision respected. All this could have been done in a few months.

Finally, if the ability to suspend regulations applied to social housing and student housing, therefore to non-profit housing, it would be useful and safer. Openness to all projects is cause for concern.

The real causes of the crisis

Among the fundamental causes of the housing crisis, there is, first and foremost, the disengagement of the State. The private sector is only interested in social or affordable housing if it is obliged to do so and to the extent that it is subsidized. For almost two decades, the federal government was disinterested in the question of housing; it has just returned to it. Quebec, too, began by disengaging, then it outright denied the housing crisis, only to wake up recently, under pressure from cities^⁠2.

Other factors also clearly play a role. Population growth in Canada has never been so rapid since 1957, it is now one of the highest in the world^⁠3. The National Bank recently asked the federal government “to review its immigration objectives in order to allow supply [en logement] to catch up with demand » ⁴. It is willful blindness to believe that demographics have no impact on the housing crisis. Short-term economic factors also have a major impact. For the Quebec Provincial Association of Home Builders, “the increase in interest rates and the tightening of financing conditions have stopped the machine”^⁠5.

Real cases of “not in my backyard” exist. The administrative burden exists. But these are just diversions. State disengagement, demographics, construction costs and access to capital are the real explanations for the housing crisis.

We dramatize the weaknesses of our institutions, we forget the positive contribution of citizen counter-powers, we make compromises with which we will have to live for a long time and we forget the real causes of the crisis. It is the latter that the government should tackle.