Social housing law frightens the pigeons
Metro says Lionel Perez is claiming that Projet’s law mandating some amount of social/affordable housing in new projects (that link is from June) will be disastrous for the middle class and send more people fleeing to the suburbs. La Presse, which usually has less biased headlines, says one professor’s theories destroy the city’s law in flames.
Filp 23:50 on 2019-10-24 Permalink
The professors theories regarding this law reflect my thoughts exactly, so I’ll save myself the effort of repeating those exact points. But at what point in time did the government fall so far off the social housing rythme that the only viable solution is to handicap the private housing market with the burden of construction? The late 90s I’m assuming? It would be unimaginable today to match the quantities of social housing constructed in the past, (in eras which I doubt had the multi billion dollar budgetary surplus Quebec has these days). Instead we have a public sector with skeletal funding and construction, and and a soon to be overburdened private sector. As if we needed something on top of nimbyism to restrict construction further.
Voters haven’t shown concern for the governments gradual disinvestment in society it seems. Or at least it happened too slowly to notice. Until there is a 20 thousand person waiting list for social housing!!
mare 08:34 on 2019-10-25 Permalink
The problem can be “easily” solved. Instead of building more HLMs the government could just subsidize part of the rent of people with low income, with a sliding scale. They do it in Ottawa that way (and probably in other cities too) and it seems to work. It’s analogous to subsidizing day care, and why is making babies more important than making rent? The government didn’t start their own day cares, they just give money to companies and thus create an incentive to start CPEs. When landlords get part of the rent from the government, building cheap rental apartments with a more or less guarantee return might suddenly make economic sense for developers.