McGill’s 1600 teaching assistants will be on strike starting Monday.
Update: The union picketed on Monday in front of the Roddick Gates.
Updates from March, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A downtown demonstration in support of Gaza went off peacefully Saturday afternoon despite the wintery weather.
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Kate
If you’ve looked out the window you won’t be surprised to hear that we’re under a winter weather advisory. But it should be sunny and 2° on Sunday.
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Kate
Another fire broke out overnight in another vacant building in the Quartier des spectacles.
Which suggests several questions. Are these fires being set on purpose? Or is it that squatters break in and eventually do something that sparks a fire? And, before even these questions: why, in the midst of a housing crisis, do we have so many vacant buildings?
Also this week, early Thursday, there was a fire at the Olympic stadium which has damaged the facility where a lot of Olympic hopefuls train in various sports.
Update: The building on St-Dominique has collapsed.
Nicholas
The vacancy rate in January 2024 was the lowest it’s been in over two decades, at 1.6% for the island, 1.5% for the region and 1.3% for the province, according to CMHC. (Quebec City is worse, at 0.9%.) But that still means lots of vacant units, even if it’s low compared to 3% percent, which is considered healthy and balanced.
The reason most units are vacant is usually because they’re under renovation or uninhabitable, which is usually due to a lack of money (and interest rates are really high now to borrow). Most people who own a property are not going to let it sit and not earn income in the hottest and most expensive market in decades while they still pay taxes, insurance, etc. There are some exceptions — people who want to move in soon so don’t want to lock up the place with a renter for 1.5 years, and people hoping a place will deteriorate so it can burn or collapse and they can rebuild it taller — but overall there are very few vacancies, and even fewer that are just habitable units sitting vacant.
dhomas
My kids have to miss their swimming lessons this weekend on account of that fire at the Olympic stadium. 🙁
Ephraim
We have vacant buildings because we don’t tax owners for vacancy. Bill 39, it passed but I think they postponed implementation.
Squatters sometimes aim to heat when there isn’t heating. Others, drop cigarettes, etc.
mare
I don’t think vacancy rates are very precise. I don’t know where the data comes from (maybe from Revenu Quebec’s Relevé 31, because unlikely RQ shares that data) but my guess is that’s an estimate of spaces that are actively advertised as ‘for rent’ compared to the total rental stock.
I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of hidden vacancy, like empty condos or houses that are used as an investment property or illegal AirBnb; buildings that were rented a long time ago but are now kept empty waiting for permits (or until they fall apart and can be turned into fancy condos with a nice facade); or buildings that were residential but are now mainly used as offices but still have a condo on an upper floor, are included in those statistics.
I also know several apartments in plexes in my street that are empty for a while and not for rent. Most likely because the owners want to sell the building in the near future (‘when the market goes up’) and a plex will be more valuable with some empty apartments than fully rented (for example in my neighbour’s plex). (The reason is that the new owners can move in and wait until they can evict the ground floor tenants, or have a place to live when they do extensive renovations.) Or the apartments had really low rents before the tenants moved out, and after they’ve been kept empty for a year they can be legally put back on the market for triple the rent (meaning the loss in rent can be recouped in three years, and after that it’s both more revenue and a higher value of the plex). I don’t think these kind of vacancies are included in the statistics because nobody knows about them.
Nicholas
mare, the survey uses telephone interviews and site visits, and doesn’t include buildings with only one or two units. You can review the methodology if you want in the appendix. Regardless, even if the data is not perfect, it was similarly not perfect over the last two decades, so if it’s wrong that we have the lowesr vacancy rate in decades we’d need issues that are missed by the survey but didn’t exist or weren’t as relevant previously. And the fact rents have grown so much, and that rents are generally directly inversely related to vacancy, makes it likely the survey is pretty much spot on.
Ephraim, taxing vacancy is good, but it’s hard to administer. Much easier to just raise property taxes and then give all that extra money to residents (not building owners). This would be a wash for owner-occupiers, renters, and landlords who rent their places out (who can raise rents to cover the taxes, while the renters get the rebate), but would be costly to people who left their units vacant or who rent them out on AirBnB, incentivizing them to get moving on renovations and renting. Better yet is to tax land instead of all property (including building), which means that a demolished or derelict building or empty lot will pay the same taxes as the productive building right next to it (per hectare), incentivizing them even more to get their act in gear.
Kate
I’ve mentioned before how very many vacant residential buildings I ran into when doing census work in 2021. This was in Villeray and down into Petite‑Patrie. I still often walk past a building that has 12 apartments in it, and that I know has not been occupied since that time. I sometimes wonder what’s become of the long row of duplexes on Henri‑Julien that I realized had been emptied out and weren’t occupied when I checked them out that summer.
I used to have a neighbour who was very old. He lived on the ground floor of a nice duplex. According to him, he hadn’t had an upstairs tenant in a long time. He said it was too much trouble, plus the building was long since paid for and he didn’t need the income.
He has died since then, his family (whom I never saw before that – the only people who visited him were care workers) arrived and cleared his stuff out, and now new people live there, both upstairs and downstairs. In a way, it’s nice to know the upstairs flat is occupied again. But maybe it takes having elderly owners die before changes can be made.
Blork
This building on St-Laurent just north of St-Viateur has been vacant since I lived up around there in 1991. https://maps.app.goo.gl/1qCoZuaZ5VKnxmy79?g_st=ic
JP
I also have elderly neighbours who own and occupy a unit of their duplex but have chosen to keep the upstairs unit empty. My friends’ parents do the same. At a certain age, I can see how it’s a hassle. You might end up with “bad” tenants and it’s a lot to deal with. I actually don’t blame them. My aunts’ tenants accidentally started a fire, brought in bed bugs…etc.
There are also a few homes in the area that are empty….the windows are boarded up. I looked up the addresses a while back and it looks like very old people who are now in care homes own them, and I guess once they pass on something will happen to the houses but for now they just stand empty.
Ephraim
@Nicholas – If I understand correctly, they either don’t pay property tax or they pay lower property tax. This will tax them for leaving it unoccupied, lowering the interest in having it occupied.
Joey
Wait so Minister Durance’s major housing reform bill didn’t solve all, sorry *any,* of these problems? Shocking…
David S
I used to pass in front of that building for years, and saw it gradually deteriorate to the point where I used to cross the street thinking that one day the facade would fall on me on the sidewalk. And, yes, there were squatters.
Joey 16:03 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
Nothing against the TAs in principle and without being aware of the issues and the degree to which their pay is below their market value or relevant benchmarks, but it’s hard to imagine the union making any kind of progress given how the province has taken an axe to the university’s funding envelope.
Kate 17:58 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
McGill has deep pockets, though. They’re just stuck in a sort of neoliberal 1990s attitude that education should be for profit.
Joey 07:24 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
It does have a huge endowment but that money can’t really be accessed for ordinary operating costs, for the most part.
Kate 10:15 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
Interesting. Then what’s it for?
(McGill’s TAs are paid considerably less than people doing the same job in other universities in eastern Canada, and the amount hasn’t risen recently, not even close to inflation. I don’t work for the university but I do some work for one of its other unions, not the TAs’ union AGSEM, but close enough to be somewhat aware of the issues.)
jeather 10:31 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
I was looking at the Canadian medical residency stuff prior to match day (someone I know was matching) and the salary difference between Quebec (first year: 49k) and the other provinces (59-73k depending on the province) was really shocking. I’m not surprised this kind of difference is also visible in other parts of the university.
dwgs 11:05 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
Speaking as an employee of McGill I can assure you that we are not swimming in money. It’s a constant struggle to keep up.
Joey 11:28 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
@Kate imagine you’re a donor. They make a big pitch to you to fund a research chair or a scholarship. You acquiesce and open the tap. Now imagine they call you up and say, actually we wanna use that money to give our TAs a raise… Maybe you don’t open the tap quite so enthusiastically. That’s how you can have a huge endowment (which generates, for themes part, what universities call ‘restricted income’) and an operating deficit (or program cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs, etc.).
Again, not to dismiss the union’s complaint, but you need to read the room a bit – and as we saw with the FAE, even a publicly supported teacher’s strike doesn’t produce results that union members are excited about in the current context. The Legault cuts to the English university sector will make it ludicrously easy for McGill to dismiss the TA’s complaints, IMO.
Kate 20:28 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
I suppose big time donors want a big deal thing named after them, and wouldn’t just say “hey, here’s ten million simoleons to best improve the quality of teaching”….
Tim S. 21:18 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
They could probably get money to improve ‘quality of teaching’, but it would be to hire someone with a snazzy TED talk to consult on the latest jargon, not something boring like reducing class sizes.
Joey 11:07 on 2024-03-26 Permalink
I don’t think the point is that it’s bad or unjust that donors want vanity projects – a lot of them just want to make specific contributions to the program or department they studies in. Scholarships, research chairs, etc. Yes, many are motivated by their own personal experience, but that’s valid, no? Like if you were loaded and some heart surgeon saved your life, you might be motivated to endow a research chair related to whatever your disease was. A donor who wants to ‘best improve the quality of teaching’ would probably be more interested in investing in applied pedagogical research than paying TA salaries, no? I know a couple of young professionals who endowed an anonymous scholarship at their law school to support students of colour. These are all good things!
The point, however, is that what makes universities like McGill ‘rich’ isn’t the funding they get from governments or via tuition (with some exceptions given international tuition fees that are all in flux anyway), it’s the research and philanthropic income that makes them stand out. I don’t think it’s appropriate or reasonable or even legal to rely on research funders or donors to cover things like TA salaries. Why would we want to rely on philanthropy to pay for the nuts and bolts of running any school – from elementary to university? What happens when your prominent donors don’t like the students’ attitudes about, say, Gaza? Shouldn’t a wealthy society adequately fund its schools without relying on donations?
As McGill’s president pointed out in the Gazette this week, the province’s English universities are actually penalized by the provincial funding formula, because (unlike the province’s French institutions) they don’t get special envelopes for things like doing maritime research or being a prominent urban university. To the extent that McGIll might get a slightly larger share of operating income, it’s a function of a funding policy that is based on student enrolment, which provides more or less money depending on the observed cost of teaching in that discipline. So McGill gets more funding per student because it has expensive programs, like medicine, where as the UQ in, I dunno, Abitibi might get slightly less.