Anyone who has recently had to deal with the rental housing market has noticed it, but the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) confirmed it on Wednesday: available housing has not been this scarce in Canada for years. decades, and the price of rent is increasing at high speed.
In Montreal, the vacancy rate is stagnating at around 1.6%, and the average price of rent for a two-bedroom unit has jumped 7.9% compared to last year. In certain regions of Quebec, the vacancy rate has fallen below 1%. No one denies the existence of the housing crisis anymore. Who could, faced with such crazy figures, and the less and less discreet spectacle of the tenants’ miseries?
If it is now impossible to continue burying our heads in the sand, it would be equally naive to interpret the current crisis as a one-off phase, or even an anomaly in the modern history of housing in Quebec.
This week, the activist and former spokesperson for the Popular Action Front in Urban Redevelopment (FRAPRU) François Saillant published the essay In the street. A history of FRAPRU and the struggles for housing in Quebec, published by Écosociété. In this book, the author reviews the policies adopted in terms of housing, both by the federal government and the provincial government, from the end of the Second World War.
Destruction of working-class neighborhoods in the name of urban modernization, prioritization of access to property to the detriment of the creation of housing outside the private market, indifference to the problems of residential insecurity and poor housing experienced by low-income tenants: the housing crisis film has been playing on repeat for more than half a century.
By recounting the struggles of FRAPRU, François Saillant makes an implacable demonstration. Renting households, the working classes, have always been treated as beggars in the housing market, and the State has never seriously considered housing to be a fundamental right guaranteed to citizens.
In 1984, Saillant recalls, in the midst of an economic crisis, when catastrophic interest rates resulted in crazy rent increases and many civil society groups were demanding new social housing, the Parti Québécois government gave birth to a green paper on housing, which opens with a sentence summarizing everything about neoliberal governance in housing: “It is not up to the State to house Quebecers, but up to Quebecers to house themselves. » Between this and the encouragement to invest in real estate addressed to tenants by the current Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, the ideological connection is clear… and it borders on a permanent crisis.
The crisis we are experiencing today, however, notes Saillant, is unique in that it is affecting all fronts at the same time. Housing has never been so commodified and financialized — that is, instrumentalized as a financial asset — in a moment of extreme scarcity and neglect in the face of the erosion of the principle of security of tenure. Tenants have rarely faced such a hostile environment.
Last week, it was the housing security of seniors that hit the headlines, when the closure of another private seniors’ residence (RPA) was announced, for reasons of profitability, in the east of Montreal. The testimonies collected from residents of the RPA of the Botanical Garden were moving to tears: people aged 75, 80, 85 years old visibly distraught, confiding to the camera that they did not know where they would go or how. You don’t always recover from a hasty move at this age.
In the last five years, 500 RPAs have closed their doors across the province, forcing their residents to relocate in a more than hostile market. Difficulties recruiting staff, operating costs too high, inability to find a buyer — what do you want? We are not going to house people at a loss. The business model, it is said, must be reviewed. Very good, but are we really considering solutions that will protect elderly tenants from the ravages of private housing management?
This week, the Minister responsible for Seniors, Sonia Bélanger, announced that the government had already planned to devote $200 million over five years to help small RPAs cover their operating costs and reduce the costs assumed by residents for care they receive. On the other hand, the measure does not affect rents in RPAs, which remain the prerogative of the establishments – after all, they are private companies, recalled the minister. Meanwhile, his colleague at Housing rejected the idea of including amendments to Bill 31 aimed at better protecting senior tenants against evictions, wherever they live.
This sequence sums it all up. No one denies the existence of the housing crisis anymore, not even the government. In the office of the Minister of Housing this week, we did not say we were surprised by the data revealed by CMHC. Simply, instead of looking at the root causes of the problem, we hand out band-aids and designate new scapegoats. The latest, moreover, is population growth. We’ll come back to that.
Therefore, as long as the market is allowed to meet the population’s housing needs, vulnerable people will be left behind, housing inequalities will continue to widen, and the population’s living conditions will continue to erode.