This text is part of the special Real Estate section
Nothing better illustrates the challenge of community real estate than the new project of the People’s Housing Society of East Montreal (SHAPEM) in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. Starting in winter 2023, the organization Habitations Loge-Accès will welcome 15 tenants aged 40 and over in 10 studios and 5 renovated apartments on rue Sainte-Catherine Est, just opposite Square Dézéry, in the heart of Old Hochelaga. But to get there, it was the cross and the banner.
“The building, occupied by prostitutes and drug dealers, was a plague for the neighborhood. As criminal property, it had been seized and in 2015, the authorities approached SHAPEM to ask us to take it back to do something with it”, explains Jean-François Racette, general manager of SHAPEM , which manages 1,800 community housing units with total assets of $200 million under management, primarily in the east of the island.
In the long history of SHAPEM, created in 1988, this project ranks among the most complex. First, because the takeover of the building took place at the worst time of the underfunding of community housing. But the old rooming house from 1880 represented a serious renovation headache: the technical-heritage shambles involved three buildings nested one inside the other, with the obligation to protect the heritage cornices and windows.
“We acquired it thanks to the Montreal investment fund (FIM), but the project could not be finally released until 2021 thanks to the Initiative for the rapid creation of housing (ICRL)”, explains Jean-François Racette, who is an economist by training.
The ICRL, created in 2020 by the federal government, aims to accelerate the construction of community housing projects for homeless people and women’s groups. “But we couldn’t have done it either without the organization Bâtir son quartier, which has been involved in all stages. »
Many stakeholders
“When a group wants to launch a project, Bâtir son quartier looks for the site, negotiates the land, arranges the financing, coordinates the work and organizes management training,” explains its general manager, Édith Cyr.
In community housing jargon, Bâtir son quartier is a TRG, or technical resource group. Of the 25 TSOs in Quebec, Bâtir son quartier is the largest, with more than 10,000 housing units, community centers and CPEs to its credit.
Essential pillars of all community housing in Quebec, the GRTs were born 40 years ago from the initiative of young architects who wanted to ensure the technical capacity of the first community housing projects, first in the form of cooperatives and then in housing NPO. In fact, almost all cooperatives and all NPOs-H in Quebec have been realized through a TSO.
Wrongly, social housing is too often associated with HLM. However, HLMs are the property of municipal housing offices, very cumbersome administrative structures under the authority of the Société d’habitation du Québec. In fact, more than half of the social housing stock is made up of cooperatives and NPOs-H.
“The idea of community housing is to allow residents to be represented on the board of directors of their housing and to give them control over their housing conditions,” says Édith Cyr, who was one of the founders of Bâtir son neighborhood in 1994.
Although SHAPEM specializes in low-cost, tenant-managed housing, it must enlist the help of third-party organizations to assist in management in buildings intended for certain groups, for example young people, people with disabilities or the homeless — as will be the case for Habitations Loge-Accès in Hochelaga. “The tenants will need ongoing support from the Department of Health and Social Services for community management, under an agreement with the Old Brewery Mission,” explains Jean-Pierre Racette.
Financial release
Edith Cyr and Jean-Pierre Racette know a lot about the financial bottlenecks that have been strangling the entire community housing sector for years and of which we are only beginning to see the end coming—perhaps.
The troubles began in 1994 when the federal government withdrew from direct financing of social housing in public housing. Quebec has compensated for this lack with a program called AccèsLogis, which several provinces envy. Except that starting in 2009, the Quebec government froze its contribution to AccèsLogis. “But construction costs were rising year after year, and it was getting harder and harder to finance projects. From 2015, it reached a crisis level. In 2018, the backlog of projects awaiting financing (the famous “backlog”) amounted to 15,000 dwellings. »
The first release came in 2020 with the creation of the ICRL, which made it possible to bail out AccèsLogis. The Quebec government has just created the Quebec Affordable Housing Program, but Edith Cyr hopes with all her heart that it will not take advantage of it to scuttle AccèsLogis.
“If we want to solve the fundamental problem, which is the lack of affordable housing, it will take several tools in the toolbox. »