“Suicide is right on the edge of the corner…”
Her throat knotted with emotion, Marie Leblanc does not finish her sentence. The 60-year-old lives in accommodation on the South Shore of Montreal that costs her $795 per month, which represents 61.5% of her meager monthly income of $1,292. He doesn’t have much left to feed himself, to clothe himself, to transport himself.
Marie testified in a video presented on Monday at the opening of the “Acting together for housing” day, organized by Centraide of Greater Montreal, which submitted a book of staggering figures on the housing crisis in the census metropolitan area. (CMA) of Montreal.
These data were released on the same day that the Association of Construction and Housing Professionals (APCHQ) informed us that the number of collective housing starts last April was down for an eighth consecutive month.
Negative income
The Centraide study tells us that one in five households (19%) in Greater Montreal, or 360,000 households in the region that extends from Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu to the North Crown, do not have enough income to pay for their housing and basic needs. In other words, once the rent is paid, there isn’t enough left to eat properly, clothe and move around.
The study, conducted by the firm McKinsey, is the first to measure “residual income” for Greater Montreal, ie what remains in our pockets once taxes, rent and basic needs have been paid. According to this study, you need a minimum income of $28,000 to not end up “in the red”. Below this threshold, one must either go into debt or cut consumer spending, and this is called a negative residual income.
Deficit of $3.6 billion
According to a calculation based on Statistics Canada data, the residual deficit of the 360,000 households surveyed amounts to $3.6 billion per year. And the heart of the problem is the high cost of housing or, in other words, the glaring lack of social and affordable housing.
“Across Quebec, including in the greater Montreal area, the housing shortage is above all a shortage of affordable housing,” said the Minister responsible for Social Solidarity, Chantal Rouleau, at the start of the day.
Next to nothing
The president and executive director of Centraide of Greater Montreal, Claude Pinard, illustrated the problem of unaffordable housing in this way: “Everyone has already asked themselves the question when renting accommodation: do I have the means to pay me for this accommodation? How much money will I have left at the end of the month? »
For one in five households, the answers to these two questions are “no” and “less than nothing”, which leads them to make “inhuman choices that affect the dignity of those who find themselves in these situations; those who agree to live in substandard housing for lack of better options; those who have to cut back on something as essential as food; those who have to live on the street,” described Mr. Pinard.
Severe lack of social housing
The study proves him right in many respects. Greater Montreal has only 4.9% of social housing, compared to 7% in Toronto, while 46% of households are tenants in the metropolis compared to only 40% in the Queen City.
This percentage is certainly above the Canadian average of 3.5%, and Canada has nothing to brag about, which is at 21e rank of the 34 countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD average, at 6.9%, is almost identical to Toronto’s and represents a goal to aim for, according to the authors of the study. Currently, an average of only 1,400 subsidized housing units are built per year in Greater Montreal. It would take about 5040 per year to reach the OECD average by 2030.
However, in recent years, far more unaffordable housing has been built than subsidized housing, and the affordable housing market has experienced a bottleneck with vacancy rates well below the 3% equilibrium, and this , in all sizes of accommodation, from studios to three-bedroom apartments and more.
“A major crisis”
The Legault government, which has long denied the housing crisis, has finally taken action. The Minister responsible for Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, was in tune at the start of the day, speaking of a “major crisis” and promising a housing action plan very soon, a new affordable housing program with calls for projects next month and a bill to “restore a better balance between tenants and owners”.
The government, she says, “cannot solve the crisis on its own,” but it will certainly have to lend a strong hand because the private sector is heading in the opposite direction. The APCHQ press release published on Monday reports a 47% decline in the number of collective housing starts in April compared to April 2022 and a cumulative decline of 43% since the start of the year.
“Gifts for Children”
Nothing, therefore, to reassure Marie Leblanc as to the forthcoming appearance of social housing that would allow her to devote much less to her rent, she who does not however ask for much.
“If my rent cost me less, I could go out, I could have money to go to the movies, to eat, to buy presents for the children, to have a kind of small fund to live on… to live on”, she drops, dreamily.