Every city in Quebec has its share of abandoned buildings, these wrecks that quietly deteriorate, obscuring the beauty of the landscape. As journalists from the Duty Zacharie Goudreault and Jean-François Nadeau, Montreal alone is said to have some 800 of these impossible-to-hide boils. Each of these vacant and abandoned buildings drags its history and pedigree, but all are offensive to the eye and shock morality in a context where housing is lacking.
At the corner of a street in Montreal, here is one of these ruins. It has stood there for years, its openings barricaded, its masonry eaten away by the elements, its entrances forced by makeshift occupants. The building has not been heated for a long time—in total violation of the regulations in force—and has no water supply. But despite its sad appearance, this building sits on land that is of enviable value. Its owner has no use for the building, because he is perhaps waiting for the tempting deal that will allow him to sell the land. While waiting for this opportunity, the building is falling into disrepair.
This is among other things what our reports have demonstrated. From an urban planning perspective, the affair is shocking, because this challenge of vacancy degrades the general impression that the city gives off. From a social justice perspective, it could not be more embarrassing: while the homeless are piling up to the point where the housing crisis is a national affair, are we letting these empty shells rot over time, without taking action?
The City of Montreal did indeed adopt a bylaw in 2023 with the specific aim of encouraging owners of vacant buildings to better manage this heritage, rather than practicing a policy of abandonment. You must now “register” your vacant building — but the form is not available, even though the measure will come into effect later this year. You must now pay a fine if you do not comply with the rules in force, the first of which stipulates that “it is prohibited to deteriorate or allow a building to deteriorate.” Since the advent of this “miracle” — or bogus — bylaw, only 24 fines have been handed out. They vary between $1,000 and $40,000 for any building, and can rise to $250,000 in the case of a heritage building. But given the millions that the owners of these places could pocket, what are these paltry amounts? The mechanism may not be prohibitive enough.
When it comes to vacant and abandoned buildings, there are organizations that have ideas in their heads and are taking action to prevent the proliferation of these absurd situations — homeless people looking for a roof to shelter under and nearby, here and there, carcasses that we watch deteriorate and whose potential for rehabilitation is lost over time. The worst enemy of these buildings in disrepair is indeed the passing of time that destroys them. With the years and seasons that damage it, it is the entire immediate environment of the cursed building that also suffers from this neglect.
The social economy enterprise Entremise encourages transitional occupation, meaning that it relies on an “agile real estate strategy that consists of quickly occupying a vacant building in order to test, enrich or build a sustainable project.” There’s nothing better than living in an empty building to slow down its destruction, advocates this inspiring group, which relies on the downtime between the abandonment of a building and its future use to maximize its use. This is how, for example, the former bus station on the Voyageur block in Montreal, a true icon of real estate failure, is now home to half a dozen organizations that are doing useful work while waiting for the space to be transformed into apartments.
The Héritage Montréal group also continues to raise awareness about the risks of “vacancy,” which, over time, leads to a cycle of deterioration that is difficult to stop: “degradation, property devaluation, fire, vandalism and, ultimately, demolition.” Alongside unclassified buildings, Montreal is full of buildings with rich heritage value that no one seems to know what to do with and that languish in indifference.
At the provincial level, the Act respecting land use planning and development also provides for actions against anyone who lets a building deteriorate. Forced measures can even lead to expropriation. But as Gérard Beaudet, professor at the School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at the Université de Montréal, points out in our report, even these legal measures can work to the advantage of the owner, however negligent, because he or she is given a “nest egg” by the City, the equivalent of the market value of the expropriated property.
For urban planning reasons, abandoned buildings have always been disturbing, because they disrupt the landscape, but a social dimension of “property waste” now completes the equation to make it an intolerable situation. If our regulations and laws are not enough to discourage some negligent owners from indulging in this “waste”, then perhaps we should consider encouraging rehabilitation, even if only temporarily.