The construction of social housing in downtown Montreal has not kept pace with the rapid increase in housing starts in recent years. Result: low-income tenants are increasingly forced to move to the outskirts of Ville-Marie, deplores an organization, which urges the City to remedy this situation as part of its long-term planning for the heart of the metropolis.
The duty obtained a copy of the brief written by the Ville-Marie Housing Committee (CLVM) as part of the ongoing process by Valérie Plante’s administration to develop its 2022-2030 downtown development strategy.
In order to write its brief, the organization made an access to information request to the City’s Housing Department in order to obtain comparative data between the number of annual housing starts and social housing and “committed” communities.
The results of this query, which The duty was able to consult, report a significant increase in housing construction since 2005 in Ville-Marie. There were then 1,745 housing starts, compared to 3,626 in 2020, a number more than twice as high. However, only 136 social housing units were the subject of firm commitments two years ago in this borough, compared to 102 in 2005. Last year, when a record of 6,390 residential housing starts was reached, no housing social has been the subject of a definitive commitment in Ville-Marie.
Social housing thus represented on average only 0.9% of residential construction starts in this central borough between 2017 and 2021. A derisory percentage compared to the target of 20% initially set out in the Regulation for a mixed metropolis of the City of Montreal, which came into effect on 1er April 2021, deplores the CLVM.
“If the Regulation for a mixed metropolis had been applied as promised, we should have had 1,200 social housing units committed [l’an dernier] and there, we have zero. There is a big problem,” laments the coordinator of the housing committee, Éric Michaud, in an interview with the To have to.
In the office of the mayoress of Mont-réal, Valérie Plante, it is recalled that “several projects currently under construction were however started before the adoption of this by-law”. They therefore have an acquired right, which in many cases allows them not to build social housing as part of their real estate project. “That said, this does not mean that the current projects do not include social housing. These can in particular be deferred and built on an adjacent site by a [organisme à but non lucratif] or a cooperative,” adds Communications Director Marie-Pierre Hamel by email.
Diversity
In its orientation document concerning its downtown strategy, the City emphasizes the importance of preserving a “social mix” in the heart of Montreal, where 50% of households had an income of less than $40,000, during the census of 2016.
This mix is, however, jeopardized by “frantic” real estate development, which “exerts enormous pressure on the price of land, properties and rents in the sector”, if more affordable solutions are not offered to less well-off tenants, warns the Ville-Marie Housing Committee in its ten-page brief.
“It is a large-scale economic cleaning of the city center that is currently being done,” says Éric Michaud. Last year, the average rent for a two-bedroom unit was $1,659 per month, an amount significantly above other neighborhoods in the metropolis, data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation show. .
In its brief, the Housing Committee urges the Government of Quebec to invest more in its AccèsLogis program, but also asks the City to invest “a substantial part” of the tax revenues it generates in Ville-Marie “in construction of social housing on the territory of the borough”. All in order to ensure “the maintenance of the resident population with low or modest income in their living environment”, notes the document.
Conflicting demands
This brief clashes with the one submitted earlier this month by the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal (CCMM), which recommends for its part to bet on the “periphery” of the city center to develop “affordable” housing. “Although the affordability of an urban center is important, it is justified to recognize that the downtown area of a growing international metropolis is also characterized by a higher cost of living than more outlying areas,” says the CCMM in his memoir.
“It’s making a simplistic economic analysis and following the trend that there is an increased development of land in the center and that, therefore, the poor must go to the periphery,” replies Mr. Michaud. “If we follow this logic, soon, these households will soon have to leave the island of Montreal” to find housing, he adds.