Can old plan help housing crisis?
Radio-Canada reports, straight-faced, that the city has a great plan to counter the housing crisis – get this, they’ll make developers include a number of affordable units in their new buildings!
Leaving aside that “affordable” is a weasel word with no definition, this has been tried before and developers always manage to wiggle out of it. They don’t want poor people in their pristine new buildings and besides, as the report blandly observes, “les promotions craignent qu’elles [these “new” rules] les empêchent de construire des projets rentables.”
The Plante administration wants to go a little further and make a sizable chunk of any new project into social housing, but as one promoter says here – again blandly – you can’t expect that kind of concession downtown, poor people have to accept they will be living at inconveniently distant locations from jobs and services, that’s just how it is. He goes on with a veiled threat: “la Ville doit comprendre que les « capitaux sur le marché sont très mobiles ».”
Douglas 09:56 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
Broccolini is right. He brings the capital to build the project. If you shaft the developers and make it unprofitable to build their projects, you can very easily get them to stop developing.
If that is the end goal, no new developments, then fine. But then don’t complain when rental prices keep going up because there isn’t enough new supply to match the demand.
If anything, Plante should be allowing developers to build even higher in return for some affordable rental units. A win / win proposition. But the way she campaigned means reasonable win win solutions won’t be on the table.
Kate 10:06 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
Douglas, that makes no sense. If there’s demand, promoters will build. They’ll figure out how to adjust their profit margins to fit these rules. My concern is that, as in the Coderre era and previously, what this means is they’ll will wheel and deal to trade immunity for a downtown high-rise in return for a couple of sad little units in Rivière-des-Prairies.
Myles 10:37 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
If allowing developers to build as much high-cost housing as they want drove prices down, Toronto would be an affordable housing paradise. Bringing in more money just tends to increase the cost of living for everyone.
Kevin 10:47 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
Myles
Toronto is full of tiny semi detached homes in areas that need six-storey buildings.
The city actually bans non-single-family homes in most of its territory.
https://torontostoreys.com/2018/05/toronto-build-housing-yimby/
SteveQ 12:31 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
How come the city in not capable of finding money for social affordable housings while there doesnt seem to be a problem finding money for infrastructure work that is constantly increasing by the year. In the hundreds of million.
The city should stop forcing mixity in the downtown core but focus more in places such as Pointe-St-Charles, Sainte-Marie (Centre-sud), Verdun etc… it will cost less to buy land therefor they will be able to built more housings.
Ephraim 14:25 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
Kate, it’s the cost of the land and the higher you build, the more expensive it is to build…. all the materials have to travel up and down and you have to deal with weights, movement, etc. The city is likely in a better situation to charge a percentage and use the money elsewhere, where land is cheaper.
Saying this another way. If the developer has to pay 10%… he’s building 40 apartments, 10 per floor on 4 floors, that’s 4 apartments per floor. But if those apartments sell for $500K each and you can build 8 apartments in HoMa for the same $2M, are you better off insisting on 4 downtown apartments or 8 HoMa apartments? How about 16 Ahuntsic apartments?
But, if you ask me, the city shouldn’t be running apartment buildings anyway. As we see with the current problems with social housing and cockroaches and bedbugs. The city is better off subsidizing and letting professional organizations run buildings… they are more efficient at it, in any case.
qatzelok 18:18 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
The market can not create affordable homes for normal people in convenient places.
Which is why Karl Marx devoted his life to writing non-fiction rather than running casinos.
Ephraim 22:03 on 2019-06-02 Permalink
Normal people? No one is normal, just like no one is average. The average family in Quebec has 2.8 people… so can you show me an average family?
Marx was derivative, utopian and well the whole dialectic is just a pivot on Hegel. And incidentally, he also wrote fiction… but like many authors from earlier centuries, some of there less important works disappear and aren’t reproduced, which until about 2 years ago, saved us from some horrible anti-Semitic and extremely racist poems by T. S. Eliot which the British press tried to sweep under the rug.
qatzelok 08:02 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
The non-normal, self-congratulatory people who profit from other people’s pain often muddy the water of collective knowledge in order to make change impossible.
Spi 09:38 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
Ephraim is right, if the goal is to provide social housing to as many people that need it then it’s not responsible to be spending more per unit just for the sake of being downtown.
If this city had any foresight they would be buying up land in the industrial area around Chabanel and just north of Jarry park with an eye towards rezoning them in a few decades.
qatzelok 11:34 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
I strongly disagree. Not only should social housing be built on a large scale downtown (and in other central neighborhoods), extra money should be spent on architectural details and expensive materials as these exteriors “belong to us all” and would contribute to everyone’s improved quality of life.
40-story glass condo plinths with Starbucks in their bases won’t. They will further the segregation of income classes and contribute to resource waste through continued displacement of isolated commuters from far-off distances.
Bill Binns 12:13 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
I don’t see this working. These two groups of people: People who pay for new luxury condos downtown (and the taxes that go with them) and people on a list to receive free (or nearly so) housing are fairly incompatible. Imagine building a few luxury units into each subsidized housing project. Think you could sell those units for market value? This measure will boost the value of all the buildings built before the rule went into effect.
Just wait for the lawsuits arising from the people in the subsidized units being banned from the lux amenities like gyms and pools and roof-top terraces.
Why can’t the city use some of the huge bucket of taxes paid by these developers+ the property taxes that will be paid by the legit purchasers of the units to build give-away housing?
Raymond Lutz 13:40 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
“Just wait for the lawsuits arising from the people in the subsidised units being banned from the lux amenities like gyms and pools and roof-top terraces.”
Don’t worry Bill: those will be accessible only through in app reservation, requiring the most recent iOS or Android release (sorry Huawei and dated iPhone cheap owners) and due to the ‘constant high congestion’, request will be prioritised according to your social score. Even elevator calls will be queued! (using the stairs is good for poor people). Subsidised tenants will even have their own exclusive access to the buildings!
Ephraim 15:01 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
Raymond… have you complained to Hydro Quebec about the fact that there isn’t really a way to pay for electric charging a car without a credit card?
Raymond Lutz 16:37 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
Ephraim… Non, pourquoi? ….gotcha!
Uatu 16:51 on 2019-06-03 Permalink
Aren’t there already low income housing units around Ontario street East and de Maisonneuve E? If so, the occupants don’t seem to be at odds with being downtown so I don’t see why they would in Griffintown etc.
david100 17:37 on 2019-06-05 Permalink
People have mostly covered the facts, but to restate:
1. Montreal is in a housing crisis, more affordable housing is needed;
2. Building new units in Ville Marie will satisfy demand that would otherwise suck up existing higher end units, both in Ville Marie and the neighborhoods, pushing prices up and accelerating gentrification;
3. The higher the cost of bringing a unit to market, the less demand it can absorb: there’s a limit to what people will pay for new construction and when it hits the tipping point, they’ll just go with a cheaper existing unit. Again, when that demand stays in the existing unit market, it bids up the cost of those existing units, with the result of gentrification;
4. Consequently, the city should be doing everything possible to keep fees low and make the development proceed smoothly. Aside from a few fruitcakes torpedoing this or that project, this hasn’t been a significant problem in Montreal until now. Adding these costs as the city intends will certainly result in more expensive units coming to market, which means it serves lower demand, which means fewer units will be built, with the result that people will again turn to existing units in Ville Marie and the neighborhoods.
This is a phenomenon to one side of the question of whether we should maximize the value of each social housing dollar, to which the answer is: obviously, of course yes.
If the city decides to go ahead with some version of this scheme (say, fees in exchange for added density or height), it should take the money and build in cheaper neighborhoods, so that more people are housed and the benefits of greater density (shops doing better, schools staying open, more eyes on the streets, etc.) are distributed more widely. Plus, the city’s plan would force lower income people into higher HOA fee buildings (try paying a luxury building monthly maintenance fee on $50,000/year).