Isabelle Melançon, in her appeal, identifies good findings on the housing crisis, in particular on the economic elements which have been current particularly since the pandemic (labour shortage, drop in supply, increase in interest rates and materials).
But the crisis had been in the rearview mirror for a few years already, although to varying degrees depending on the region and on the population groups that were already suffering from the affordability crisis.
Without opposing the crisis of affordability and the crisis of supply, too few actors currently differentiate between the two, taking shortcuts by stipulating that more supply will bring us back to affordability. No one can be against a truth from La Palice when key elements are omitted.
Housing affordability should be measured by the rate of effort (the share of the budget) that a household must devote to housing expenditure. However, in recent years, there has been a tendency in various circles to speak of affordability based on the median cost of rents, which has increased much more quickly than incomes, impoverishing households, even if in general, their incomes have increased.
If, in the current situation, it is true that there is reluctance among developers to go ahead with projects, it is mainly due to the uncertainty of the yield of units to be sold at a price that fewer and fewer households can pay.
These yields were such that until recently, housing starts were there, despite some existing municipal barriers mentioned by Mme Melancon.
It has often been decried on the side of developers, for example, that the by-law forcing an inclusion or contribution in social or affordable and family housing from the City of Montreal (commonly called 20-20-20) was a brake on construction. However, in the first two years of the application of this regulation, Montreal, like the rest of the country, experienced record housing starts.
Yes, it is important to look at the levers allowing more construction, densification, new construction principles, rules of the game, etc. But an increased supply of housing units will not lower prices. At best, it will mitigate the deepening of the crisis. But if the price of the housing unit delivered reaches thresholds that 60%, or even 70%, of Quebec households cannot afford, the affordability crisis will not ease.
Especially since in the existing private market, when housing becomes available, a strong trend seems to be confirmed, that of a price increase much higher than what the scales of the Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL) indicate.
Due to a lack of real control of rent adjustments in Quebec and a lack of knowledge of the rules by households or a fear of contesting their landlord, we have witnessed a leveling of prices towards the new market in the existing private market, when there should be a greater gap.
To really bring about a lasting response to the crisis, in the absence of magic short-term solutions in increasing an affordable and sustainable supply, it is essential, on the one hand, to build more subsidized housing for low- and modest-income segments of the population, but also to protect part of the existing private housing stock from speculation by socializing it by encouraging non-profit companies to take them over.