The City of Montreal is aiming to build 700 housing units on the southern part of Îlot Voyageur, which it acquired in 2018. According to Mayor Valérie Plante, the real estate project must include at least 20% social housing.
The City will shortly launch a call for proposals to encourage developers to submit development projects for the site. The selected developer will be chosen based on criteria determined by the City, including the number of affordable and social housing units that will be offered. The number of affordable and social housing units will also represent 50% of the final score, said the head of housing on the executive committee, Benoit Dorais. Although most of the future building will be devoted to housing, the ground floor will include office spaces and shops.
Once the developer is chosen, the City will resell the 650,000 ft² land so that work can begin on the site in the summer of 2025. The current buildings will have to be demolished to make way for the new construction.
The Plante administration would like this development formula to serve as a model for other lands it owns. “It will be reproducible at other sites with the necessary adaptations. We have a lot of sites to redevelop. We continue to buy sites,” underlined Mr. Dorais.
Montreal took more than five years to move the project forward. In 2013, following the financial fiasco of Îlot Voyageur, a project led by UQAM, the Aquilini Group acquired the northern part of the site, which now includes housing as well as the new train station. coaches. For its part, the City of Montreal acquired the land located south of the quadrilateral at a cost of $18 million. It originally envisioned a high proportion of office space for its own use, but the pandemic and remote working ultimately led it to revise its plans.
Two organizations, the Colibri delivery service and Les Valoristes, temporarily occupy part of the building acquired by the City and will have to be relocated.
Forgotten student accommodation, deplores the opposition
The opposition was hardly impressed by the administration’s announcement. “We are very disappointed with what was presented this morning. It’s been six years since the City acquired the land in the southern part of the Voyageur block and all we are presented with is an absence of vision which is based on a proposed call for projects from the of promoters,” commented Ensemble Montréal advisor Julien Hénault-Ratelle.
And this type of strategy has not served the City well in the past, he said, recalling the case of the Hippodrome which had attracted little interest from developers.
The elected official from Ensemble Montréal also deplores that the administration has not made room for student housing even though the site is located near UQAM and the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal.
All in all, it will be a decade before we see a project emerge on this strategic site, he said.
Mobilization and development agent at the Ville-Marie Housing Committee, Samuel Vanzin judges that social housing should represent 100% of housing built on the Îlot Voyageur site. “The rate of 20% of social housing corresponds to the Regulations for a mixed metropolis, but we expect this to be something that applies to private sites, not to public sites,” he explains. .
Especially, he says, none of the major real estate projects that have seen the light of day in Ville-Marie in recent years have included social housing. And although the City places a lot of emphasis on affordable housing, it is not really affordable in reality, says Mr. Vanzin.
He is also disappointed that the City has not kept a place for the Colibri delivery service and the Valoristes. “Keeping them could have been integrated into the analysis grid. »
Will developers be interested in responding to the City’s call? Friday, the Urban Development Institute of Quebec (IDU) did not want to comment on the matter.