From the ban on merging housing to create single-family residences to the addition of accessory dwellings on land already occupied by houses, Quebec cities are showing ingenuity to tackle the crisis plaguing the region. rental market by stimulating the construction of new housing while preserving existing ones. Overview.
Residents of Plateau-Mont-Royal were able to speak out last Tuesday, during a public meeting, on regulatory changes that the borough wishes to implement in order to automatically prohibit the conversion of duplexes and triplexes into residences. single-family. In fact, since 2017, 139 housing units have been withdrawn from the rental market in Plateau-Mont-Royal due to the transformation of duplexes into single-family residences, following the granting of permits authorizing these conversions in the borough. .
“We must not forget the importance of small housing,” underlines the municipal councilor of the Mile End district, Marie Plourde, who notes that several single-parent families will generally seek to occupy one floor of a duplex or triplex. However, these rental accommodations are threatened by the phenomenon of “spatial obesity”, which encourages owners to occupy a larger space, for example by enlarging their kitchen or converting a room of their home into a work space, underlines Mme Plourde.
In a report published last February, the holder of the Chair of Energy Sector Management at HEC Montréal, Pierre-Olivier Pineau, noted that the average surface area of housing units had increased by 23% in Quebec. , between 1990 and 2021, a period during which the size of households nevertheless decreased.
“If we complain of having a housing crisis, what is paradoxical is that we have never had so many empty rooms” in homes in the province, underlines Mr. Pineau, who recommends to the government Legault to impose a form of taxation on Quebecers based on the number of square meters they occupy for housing.
In the meantime, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal wishes to improve the regulatory changes implemented in 2021 by extending the ban on reducing the number of housing units in an existing building to its entire residential sector. The fines imposed on offenders will also be doubled to reach $1,000 for a first offense and $2,000 for a repeat offense, if it is a natural person, indicates a presentation from the district. It will be double for businesses.
Increase density
Since 2019, the City of Longueuil has prohibited the transformation of rental buildings into divided co-ownerships when the vacancy rate on the rental market is below 3%. “But we could extend this measure to single-family residences”, if the latter ultimately represented a threat to the rental sector, confided to the Duty the mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier. For the moment, however, it is quite the opposite that is happening in her city, she notes. “What we see the most in Longueuil is the demolition of single-family homes to create multiplexes,” or buildings with several dwellings, generally intended for tenants. A situation that poses certain challenges for the South Shore city.
“We want to densify the territory and, at the same time, we want to protect heritage, so there is a balancing act that we face,” underlines Mme Fournier.
The elected officials of Plateau-Mont-Royal and Longueuil are far from being the only ones to think about ways to tackle the needs in terms of preservation and creation of rental housing. At the level of the Metropolitan Community of Montreal (CMM), which includes 82 municipalities, an overhaul of the Metropolitan Planning and Development Plan (PMAD), which dates from 2012, is underway. The objective of this approach, which will be successful next year, is in particular to review the density thresholds throughout the region, where individual houses represented half of construction starts in the early 2000s. In 2022 , this percentage had fallen to 6% in the region, in favor of the construction of rental buildings.
However, “despite this densification of the built environment, the use of available space for low-density developments remains worrying,” wrote the CMM in a report released last year. Thus, even if single-family homes only represented 7.6% of construction starts in the entire region between 2016 and 2021, “they constituted almost half (46%) of the space used for residential development,” the report noted.
In this context, the CMM intends to recommend that municipalities in the greater Montreal region facilitate the addition of accessory dwellings on land already occupied by individual houses, in order to increase the number of people housed on the same lot. This is also a measure put forward by the City of Sherbrooke, which last year began a process of regulatory change — still in progress — which aims to allow the owner of a single-family residence to add housing in the basement or in a separate building, which would be built in the backyard. Longueuil also intends to act in this direction.
Thus, by allowing owners of individual houses to accommodate tenants on their land, “we easily increase the number of housing units available in the rental stock” and, “in many cases, this does not appear in the neighborhood.” which limits the risks of citizen opposition to densification, notes town planner Marie-Michèle Cauchy, who is also responsible for revising the PMAD within the CMM.
Tax measures
In Gatineau, elected officials have decided to stimulate the construction of social and affordable housing in the city center by offering developers who include such proposals in their projects the possibility of receiving subsidies covering 90% of their municipal taxes. up to 10 years,” notes the interim mayor of Gatineau, Daniel Champagne.
The City also recently adopted a policy allowing it to sell certain municipal land to real estate developers, under certain conditions.
“What we hope is that, when a developer acquires municipal land, we work on the application of relaxation measures which will encourage, or even require in certain cases, the addition affordable, social and community housing,” explains Mr. Champagne, who specifies that 700 housing units falling into these categories will be “under construction this year” in Gatineau.