Students cram into tiny apartments
One of the things that used to give Montreal a reputation as a great place to study was its plentiful cheap apartments. Not any more. Like everyone else, students are facing harsh rent hikes and, as a result, are cramming into tiny apartments – which can’t make life any easier if you need to study and work and have a peaceful place to sleep.
SMD 16:55 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
Related, a longtime artists’ paper factory is shutting down due in part to lack of employees. As the co-founder puts it in today’s Le Devoir:
Kate 18:30 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
I was just about to post that item, SMD. I’ve been in that paper factory – even when I was there, a few years ago, the owners knew it was only a matter of time before they were swept away by rising rents or landlord plans for the building. It’s like a medieval workshop down there.
Kevin 19:19 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
I think rent and housing price increases are making people realize that if you want something to stick around you really have to spend time, energy, and money making it succeed.
Ian 21:44 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
That’s one of the things that made creative places like Montreal real hotbeds though, the risk was lower and you could try all kinds of wacky stuff. San Francisco was like that in the 50s and 60s. Soho was like that in the 70s and 80s. Portland and Berlin were like that in the 90s. Brooklyn was like that in the 00’s.
You need density, space, and low rents, but then it gets “cool” and the realtors & tourists swoop in. Once it gets expensive, all the risk-takers vanish, and all the stuff that keeps getting made becomes very “safe”.
FWIW art supplies were always weirdly expensive, there are a number of artist co-ops in Montreal with wholesale credentials that have been around for. along time just so we could get art supplies from the US at decent prices.
Chris 21:57 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
And bringing half a million immigrants every year (that’s about one Kitchener a year, our 10th biggest city) of course increases demand greatly, with supply not being built to match. (But don’t mention that, or you’re racist!)
Kevin 22:18 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
The housing problem long predates recent immigration targets. Canada has been underbuilding housing for decades — and even then, much of the housing built was of the wrong type (one-bedroom apartments or luxury homes).
Combine that with nobody planning for boomers to live longer than any other generation and their collective decision to age in place in large ’empty nest’ houses instead of downsizing to those one-bedroom condos or retirement homes, along with the unprecedented surge toward hybrid workplaces putting even more pressure on the low supply of family-sized homes, the decades-old trend toward couples devoting a greater percentage of their spending toward housing, and the lack of skilled tradesworkers among everyone Gen X and younger — and our country is faced with a problem of needing to either retrain a generation in the trades — or to import immigrants who are skilled at the trades in order to build housing for themselves and others.
Bryan 23:01 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
@Chris I was under the impression that annual immigration has been closer to 250,000 people for the most of the last 20 years.
waffles 09:16 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
Publicly owned, sustainable builds are needed, sure, but all this ‘we need to build more housing’ is playing into developper’s hands (and they build crap, look around)
There’s plenty of empty apartments & homes for everyone right now. There needs to be a mass redistribution of housing. Seize properties from housing hoarders.
Families should only own 1-2 dwellings, all apartment buildings should be converted to renter co-ops, and individuals should only be allowed to rent out living quarters if they also live in the building. All rental units should be inspected for upkeep,health & safety every year, like restaurants.
walkerp 09:21 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
A much bigger factor is the globalization of money, allowing foreign wealth to buy property in Canada which turned real estate into an investment vehicle. It’s basically a distribution of vertical wealth within a country to horizontal wealth across countries, the horizontal line being people with enough money to invest in a property outside their home country.
PatrickC 09:48 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
Not directly on topic, but there’s an interesting article comparing Quebec and Ontario housing policies, with a warning that Quebec’s affordability advantage is disappearing:
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/august-2023/affordable-housing-quebec-ontario/
Tim 10:45 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
@Waffles: Canada, as a whole, has the least amount of housing per 1000 of the G7. The country needs 1.8 million new homes to get to the G7 average. There is not enough supply for our population.
Source: https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-publications/post.other-publications.housing.housing-note.housing-note–may-12-2021-.html
Kevin 11:26 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
walkerp
A hard disagreement from me. The bigger issue is the generational shift in dual-income Canadian families devoting an ever-increasing percentage of their income to housing, combined with the ability to take equity from a building that’s not paid for and use it to get another mortgage to buy another property. Foreign owners, even in BC, only a small sliver of upscale housing.
Ten percent of owners in BC own 30% of the market. Most people who own multiple properties own their own home and a second rental property as an investment vehicle.
Retirement fund managers have been pushing income properties instead of stocks/bond/mutual funds for a long time.
The fix will require all hands on deck — including governments going back to what was done post-WWII and building housing directly. https://placecentre.smartprosperity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Working-Together-to-Build-1.5-Million-Homes-August-17-FINAL.pdf
SMD 19:08 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
A solid riposte to the claim that immigration is driving up housing prices: https://breachmedia.ca/media-wrongly-blames-immigration-canada-home-prices/.
qatzelok 21:43 on 2023-08-18 Permalink
It’s not “an immigration” thing, it’s about supply and demand. If the supply is outstripped by demand (because of population growth) then house prices go up. Increasing population can be done through natural growth or immigration.
But if a country’s elites INTENTIONALLY underbuild housing in order to get rich off of real estate, then we have a corruption problem. A large number of Canada’s MPs are landlords who make a lot of money when there are not enough houses for our growing population.
https://www.readthemaple.com/mp-landlords/
Are we being gamed into homelessness by our own governments?