Two years after Valérie Plante’s administration said a new housing bylaw would lead to the construction of 600 new social housing units per year, the city hasn’t seen a single one.
The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet.
If they don’t, they must pay a fine or hand over land, buildings or individual units for the city to turn into affordable or social housing.
Sounds to me like the fines need to be bigger.
It’s not a fine, it’s a price.
In that case the price needs to be uneconomical
Just start seizing rentals already.
Seriously. Everybody keeps their family home. Anybody with income earning property gets that turned over to the state to be converted into affordable state run family housing to give the market a reasonable floor and get more people able to own their own family home
Probably start with the investment firms and mass landlords and we might never even need to get to individual landowners.
1 to 3 units > can be owned by anyone
4 to 8 units > need to be registered as a company
9 units or more > owned by a non profit crown corporation
So, like, if you reduced the number of rentals and made it uneconomical to build rentals, would you expect the cost of rent to go up or down?
Society can build things without a profit motive.
Housing should be a human right, so rent abolition is next after expropriation of land leeches.
They will add this fine to the price of the apartments. It should be really simple: certain % of the units have to be social housing or you will not get building permit, period.
Yes, this is a prime example of why the neoliberal fascination with only acting on the market indirectly with tax/fee incentives instead of just making legal requirements or directly creating the goods and/or services the government wants is so foolish.
The neoliberal approach here would be just to tax people and if government wants to have affordable housing units they should just buy them like anybody else. Not create this ridiculous approach where we put a drag on home-building during a home-building-shortage.
It’s insane - IZ basically lets the landlords and comfortably landed gentry ignore the housing crisis while their home values climb, and meanwhile expects the builders to provide affordable housing gratis while they’re also providing market housing for people who aren’t poor-enough to qualify for something subsidized. It’s completely backwards.
Not the builders … the developers. There’s a difference.
You mean like construction contractors? Those people either directly or indirectly work for the developers. It’s not speculators and landlords being punished people, it’s people trying to get housing built, in a housing crisis.
Yes, I know that most of the people running the development industry are dead-eyed reptiles doing it for profit, but still: the shit they’re looking to profit from is building homes people live in. Something the government should not be adding extra taxes upon.
I’m sure there’s a high enough fine that would make it more financially advantageous to build social housing, but there’s also the problem of these developers be willing to take a hit on their very hefty profit margins if that means maintaining a “brand”, so I’d wager policymakers underestimated the effective fine value by a factor of 10 at least.
Quotes from Developer Nicola Padulo:
“If people can’t afford it, they should not live in the city. The city is made for the privileged.”
He says the city wants to “put its nose” in his business.
I’d love to see the privileged try to live in a city devoid of any service workers.
My city is kinda like that. Stores have no checkouts open, fast food is bad and takes forever, and restaurants are never as good in other towns
They cry anytime affordable housing pops up yet don’t understand why no one is around to stock the grocery store
That always cracks me up about Atlas shrugged. A colony of people who think they’re too good to clean toilets, gonna go far.
The right wing consistently shoots themselves in the feet and cry about how evil everyone else is for gently suggesting that maybe we at least switch to .22 rounds instead of buckshot
I love this point because they really don’t understand that if you put all the minimum wage employees 3 hours away from the city then they will need to drive 3 hours to get groceries
It’s not just out of touch rich assholes who think this. I have so many friends that love to say people who work at don’t deserve to live in any city and should get a real job. The most ironic part is non of them know how to cook and rely on fast food for the majority of their meals.
People making under the median household income are the ones who keep the city functioning and they deserve to live in the city more than someone making 300k a year.
Work at (insert service job) don’t deserve…
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who the fuck says shit like that?
Scumbags
No they won’t. They’ll just pay for delivery and carry on.
Well I certainly don’t want anyone in that city seeing my art then. My art is for the non-privileged thank you very much
If it’s less painful to pay the tax than to do the right thing, then the tax isn’t high enough. Keep doubling it until it works, and in the meantime, use the tax revenue for the city to use as low-income housing.
That’s stupid. Outsourcing to private just doesn’t work. Tax their money and build with it instead of making intermediates that will only take more money for them.
From the article: “Those fees have so far amounted to a total of $24.5 million — not enough to develop a single social housing project, according to housing experts.”
I don’t know about construction costs in Canada, but in many cities in the United States, 24 million dollars could renovate at least 120 homes, assuming a cost of $200,000 per renovation. Renovation is more expensive than building new. You could easily build 240 modest homes on undeveloped land with 24 million dollars.
I’ve left them half a million for administrative costs.
Houses are not ‘affordable housing’ and definitely are not housing projects. Medium size apartment building can easily have 100 apartments. That’s $240.000 per apartment which would be considered ‘affordable’ where I live. I’m guessing in Montreal it’s more expensive so yeah, they don’t even have money for 100 apartments which would be a small housing project.
Montreal is a relatively big city, there’s not much undeveloped land just sitting around there.
Due to the climate, houses need more isolation and heating that the typical US house. This leads to stricter regulations on house construction, which causes construction prices to rise even more…
Removing our reducing these regulations would simply allow promoters to botch the job without reducing price… So we’re stuck with these prices but have houses that keep us warm in the winter.
It’s Montreal, not Ice Station Zebra. $24m Canadian isn’t enough to build warm housing of any size?
Of course you could trivially build a single house for that price (The solution to the housing crisis isn’t lots of single family homes, its high density housing). But land is expensive and construction costs are high, 240 houses is waaaay overshooting.
It’s split between multiple developers and you wouldn’t get 600 units out of that total
It’s especially not worth it for them when you are wasting hours in the day working on that versus working on homes you can sell for over a million
They were stupid to give the developers an out. It’s not hard to do some math and figure out what it would take to recoup the penalty in rent or sales compared to the much lower revenue stream of affordable housing.
Now the fine is just part of the cost of doing business. They’ll either eat the fine, or more likely spread it out across whatever they were gonna charge for whatever they’re building instead of the affordable housing.
You can’t give greedy assholes an inch, or they’ll take a mile and then bill you for it.
Housing really is one of those aspects of the market that needs to be demonetized and handled by governments.
it is too late, it is already become rich people gold mine/golden egg that they wont let go no matter what because how stable the investment is, not to mention not taxable when empty
And then what? They would protest?
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band together is just impossible now, they learn from french revolution so well. Make sure average joe will be out on the street if they cant receive their next wage, and what you can do against government who owns all the firearms, your whole data about you and your family so you can easily blackmailed while you marching with empty stomach without place to sleep ?
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Unfortunately the government has all the tanks. And historically people will tolerate nearly anything short of death - often via food scarcity - before they actually put their own necks on the line.
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This is the thing with Lemmy - there’s all these veiled calls for violence which seem like an astroturfing campaign to foment social unrest from users on weird instances which should be banned.
You don’t need tanks - we live in a democracy - you can band together and form a political party to replace the government, and convince people to vote for you. That’s how it works.
You don’t need tanks - we live in a democracy - you can band together and form a political party to replace the government, and convince people to vote for you. That’s how it works.
That’s not true anymore and it honestly hasn’t been for the past few years, arguably a lot longer than that.
It’s also a core aspect of American democracy that the American people have the collective right to overthrow their government should it become tyrannical and try again. That’s actually why the second amendment is there, and covid more than anything showed us why it’s so important.
It’d be nice if it wasn’t necessary, but it’s much more morally harmful to allow the country to go to hell in a handbasket because you value nonviolence over the welfare of your community than it is to use violence to either hit the reset button or try something new.
We actually face genocide now. 🤦
Lmao, this is a post about Canada. Your post is the clown meme of far right bullshit, ending in a claim about genocide.
You can use your “logic” to justify anything. It’s totally garbage. “The world is ending therefore X is justified.” Just grow up and deal with it or leave and go somewhere else.
If you don’t have the political fortitude to be able to play ball in a democracy, then you won’t have what it takes to govern a country if you succeed in overthrowing it by violence.
And I am talking about the U.S. You know, your downstairs neighbor who is going through literally the same problem as you are, along with a host of other political problems, who is about to ignite into a hot civil war that will send millions of refugees up your way, who will want housing that is not there, causing a homeless crisis in your country worse than the one you have now if you don’t listen to me and fucking make your government do what it’s supposed to be doing.
Maybe you guys could do it peacefully, I don’t know. But I don’t see you trying even that. Are you sitting around waiting for the breakdown of the U.S. before you think you have the moral authority to act? Or do you just not care?
Your 10 day old account is from a Finnish Lemmy instance and already has 454 comments. All you write about is this imaginary impending civil war - 100% troll account.
I agree in principle, though I have a hard time seeing it going any other way than real estate developers getting even richer because now they just need to
bribelobby whatever politician is in charge of it for all the best dealsI mean nationalize the industry so no one makes money. Only government constructs housing. All real estate development firms are nationalized and taken over by government, all equipment seized, all construction workers now under employ of the government.
It might be the only real way to solve the problem.
Given a significant portion of politicians own investment and rental properties, I’d be nervous about how well they would actually handle owning all the housing supply. I think there are corruption issues and policies to protect the public needed before the government should own significant amounts of housing.
AKA we need a new government and to annihilate the ruling class
It will be impossible to have any functional system until the dysfunctional humans are removed from play.
We already got that. Municipal governments have control of the housing market. It’s called “zoning” and their opinion on housing is “no.”
Then buy a bunch of land and incorporate it as a separate county. Or the Canadian equivalent, I don’t know what you guys call it
Would the government have the power to force people to move?
🤔 I don’t think it would have to come to that. They could very well leave anyone who’s already there where they are, survey the neighborhood or otherwise figure out who’s renting and who’s not, turn over ownership to whoever’s renting, and seize all empty housing to distribute to individuals or families looking for a primary residence. It actually would be possible to do it humanely.
Fines are just the cost of doing business. Fines should be a percentage of gross revenue and at a significant rate. Until then corporations will continue to pay the fine and laugh to the bank.
Developers are the sleaziest slimmest sub-human peices of shit you will ever meet. I used to work in the industry, they are all the same. You could fine them half of the net revenue, and they would still pay the fine over doing anything to help society. It is so lucrative the fine would have to be absolutely enormous to make them not just pay the fine. The fine doesn’t really matter anyways because everything is done in credit leveraged against previous projects.
Making for-profit private organizations do not-for-profit work will never work. They’ll either find a way to get around it, or just not do it in the first place.
Won’t be surprised if we suddenly see a host of new 4842 square feet projects, or maybe joint projects between multiple companies (all probably owned by the same guy) that split ownership so that nobody builds more than 4842 square feet on a single plot of land.
Or alternatively they’ll just hand over useless land somewhere else in exchange for building that massive high value condo or something.
The only way to make affordable housing is to either rely on not-for-profit organizations, or the government to do it themselves.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet.
If they don’t, they must pay a fine or hand over land, buildings or individual units for the city to turn into affordable or social housing.
According to data released by Ensemble Montréal, the city’s official opposition, and reviewed by CBC News, there have been 150 new projects by private developers, creating a total of 7,100 housing units, since the bylaw came into effect in April 2021.
Benoit Dorais, vice-chair of Montreal’s executive committee and the member responsible for housing, said the two-year review would be ready this fall, despite being promised this spring.
He says Montreal isn’t a good city for investing in property: construction costs are high, there’s too much regulation, and developers like him seek as much profit as possible.
AccèsLogis, the province’s social housing fund, has only enough money to complete projects already in the works, and the Quebec government said last winter that it will be replaced with a program more attractive to private developers.
The original article contains 829 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This has always been ridiculous. This kind of Inclusionary Zoning doesn’t apply to detached homes, only to highrise condos - that is, to small units that are for many people how they’re entering the housing market. Expecting builders to cover affordable housing raises costs for those buyers.
I firmly support affordable housing developments, but expecting housing for those most unable to afford it to be funded by the second-most-unable is insanity. Every other social project is funded by taxpayers, but somehow in a housing crisis where we’ve a massive shortage of housing, we expect to shove a boat-anchor onto the costs of the very people we expect to solve the crisis and let them bear the cost? That’s lunacy.
Why do governments (not just Montreal) seem intent on creating affordable housing in very expensive areas? Surely the effective price of having that housing there could buy a lot more housing somewhere where housing is less expensive. So maybe this outcome is the best one? Perhaps (and I’m making these numbers up) a developer would rather pay a tax of $500,000 than add one unit of affordable housing, and then that $500,000 can be used to buy two units of affordable housing somewhere else where property is cheaper.
Becauae if you concentrate all your social housing in one “cheap” area, you end up with a ghetto
It doesn’t have to be concentrated in one area, it just has to be anywhere but the expensive city center.
Who do you think cleans the toilets in the city centre?
I know of thee reasons:
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Affordable housing needs to be near services and work, otherwise transit costs make the housing unaffordable. Some affordable housing in Matagimi isn’t helping, even if it’s free. The attractiveness of those services and work make the locations valuable.
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It’s not just luxury and affordable a city is trying to achieve, they ideally want all ranges of housing affordability mixed together everywhere. This mixture reduces segregation and promotes positive socioeconomic outcomes.
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The bottom up push for affordable housing (at least in Montréal) is coming from areas undergoing gentrification. So the citizen push isn’t to stick affordable housing in very expensive areas, it’s to not have affordable housing removed when the very expensive housing comes to them (Montréal examples of Verdun, Griffintown, and PSC). So your example of scraping one affordable unit to build two elsewhere still displaces an existing family/residents.
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Imagine if only rich people lived in the city center and everyone who lives on a minimum or with a low wage over 1h away by public transportation.
Do you think people would want to travel that long for a minimum wage job in the stores, restaurants and cafés of the city center? I know I wouldn’t.
We need to have social mixicity and affordable housing everywhere to accommodate the people who do the work of keeping these commerces working.
Right now downtown Montréal is on life support. Because of this. Commerces are closing everywhere.
Commerces are closing everywhere.
Should push the prices back down just fine I image, might take a bit though
Those jobs would have to pay more to offset the commute. I don’t really see the problem.
A healthy city needs socioeconomic diversity. Not that long ago Montreal was known for cheap CoL allowing people of all walks of life to thrive. Putting aside the artists, students, and general eccentrics that contribute to the vibrant life of the city, we have to consider where the hell are our minimum wage workers going to live. I seriously don’t understand how places like Vancouver do it. Does every coffee shop, fast food, retail etc worker commute 3hrs each way? What about the teachers, nurses, garbage collectors? Or do they all get paid way more and everything just costs a lot more?
There’s a compromise possible and despite being a major city without lots of undeveloped land, there is still plenty of space reasonably close to the city where high density affordable housing could be. Doesn’t have to be prime real estate right downtown. There just needs to be social will and courage to stand by the conviction that this is something good for the city. The truth is that like someone else said, the fine is too low and developers just see it as the cost of doing business.
New Vancouverite here, previously from Montreal. The answer is that it’s fucked. 1bdrm hitting 3k a month and 2bdrm is about 3800. I can’t imagine how service works are surviving. Min wage is 16.75/hr but living wages are mathed out to about 25/hr and even that would be hard.
Salaries seem to be generally lower since it’s beautiful and has mild winters. I’m not sure how long we’ll stay if things don’t get better soon. Sadly local politics are NIMBY friendly and not doing anything useful. In fact they just reduced the vacant home tax…because people weren’t reporting it on their taxes voluntarily.
It’s too bad because we found dream jobs in specialized fields here, the only other real option is Toronto (ugh, no) or the US (hard no).
It’s the same reason that homeless people are typically found in inner city areas, and not poorer suburbs. There are little to no amenities in poorer suburbs, amenities exist in more established and inner city suburbs.
As well as income, from work or otherwise.
And supportive communities that rise up organically, and a more visibility on the violence they suffer
Wow. Why shouldn’t people of all economic classes have a place that’s close to all the amenities and conveniences that cities offer? Why should they have to travel from outside the city for an hour to work, or school, or for entertainment? Why would you advocate for creating ghettos? Why shouldn’t someone who works 40 hours a week at a
