Montreal City Weblog

Updates from January, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• Kate 19:51 on 2026-01-03 Permalink | Reply  

  Three major private real estate developers are involved in building social housing in Montreal. This item asks why and arrives at some interesting answers: they’ve glutted the market but need to keep their teams working, they find the presence of the homeless is bad for business, and it may be a way to get hold of public funds, Quebec having basically given up on participating in providing housing at all.

  Tax breaks for the developers, and how they may be using these projects to offset the requirement for affordable and social housing in other projects, are not mentioned.

  SMD, Ephraim, thomas, and 1 other are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Ephraim 09:38 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    And yet, when I suggest that we use REITs to add affordable housing, by subsidizing rent and having their professional teams handle maintenance, everyone thinks I’m nuts. Meanwhile, we can see that the city’s SHDM has allowed buildings to run into disrepair. Instead a REIT has an interest in maintaining the apartments because they have profit driven clients and stockholders to appease.

    No, it’s not a perfect solution. But neither is expecting a city to run housing, when it’s not their expertise.

  • SMD 13:45 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    I hadn’t heard that the SHDM buildings are in disrepair. I’ve been in at least a dozen and they all seem well-run. Perhaps you’re thinking of the OMHM, which indeed has had multiple maintenance issues (in part due to mismanagement and past cuts to federal maintenance funding programs).

  • Joey 15:36 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    The issue of the state’s diminished capacity, despite its increasing size, is IMO the public administration challenge of our era (obviously excluding whatever nonsense Trump has in store for us). Since Francois Legault came to power, after a campaign in which he promised to reduce the size of the Quebec public sector by 5,000 positions, the number of public employees has grown by 113,000, or 23% (according to Quebec news reports form last year referring to public Treasury Board documents) – compared to just an 8% increase in the population. And yet I don’t think you could find a single Quebecer who would agree that the quality of our public service administration has improved in a meaningful way.

    The implication here is that the alternative to the private sector taking the lead here is the public sector providing an equivalent increase in social housing units; I think that’s wrong – I think the alternative is more of the same, i.e., nothing. It’s tragic that the only path forward on a housing crisis that has negative effects on all aspects of public life in Quebec seems to require private sector leadership. Having to choose between rent-seeking capitalism bound only by the ‘good faith’ of real estate developers or mega-projects run by a government that cannot do anything on time, on budget and without an inevitable corruption commission is no choice at all.

  • thomas 15:56 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    @SMD doesn’t that prove the point? SHDM is run by a non-profit corporation while the OMHM is municipal body.

  • Ephraim 23:24 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    There are provinces which simply subsidize the rent, rather than get into the business of building and running housing. And I’m not suggesting whole buildings, I’m suggesting that they are in mixed buildings. Which has proven to also has proven to uplift those in the social housing, rather than create a “ghetto”

  • SMD 10:51 on 2026-01-05 Permalink

    @Ephraim “We find no significant effect [on economic wellbeing] for in-cash assistance with the various provincial and territorial housing allowance programs offered.” Rental housing types and economic wellbeing in Canada (Housing Studies, 40(9), 2024). Rent subsidies are really landlord subsidies, and often just have the effect of raising overall rents (which in turn hurts un-subsidized renters). In fact, in at least one province the fed’s new Canada Housing Benefit actually left renters worse off: https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2024.2307595.

    @thomas There are many different models of non-profit housing, each with its pros and cons. Everything is perfectible. However, the key element to actually improve tenants’ material conditions is that it not be tethered to the speculative housing market, in other words, that it be run for the public good and not profit. The experts quoted in the CTV and Le Devoir articles worry that these private promoters will siphon public resources but continue to generate private profits:

    « Il faut s’assurer qu’il y aura une pérennité des ressources publiques qui vont être consacrées à ça, même quand c’est le privé qui est maître d’œuvre. Il y a toujours des ressources publiques, des terrains, des subventions, des prêts qui sont mis à contribution. Il faut s’assurer que ces ressources-là publiques vont mener à des logements qui vont de manière pérenne demeurer un patrimoine collectif. »

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• Kate 11:38 on 2026-01-03 Permalink | Reply  

  Taking note of recent statistics showing minors doing a growing number of violent crimes, Laval and Longueuil police are promising a new approach involving, among other things, targeting those who are recruiting minors.

  Montreal’s organized crime commandant talks more about making all of society aware of the risk. Francis Renaud says “À 14-15 ans, en pleine nuit, errer à Montréal, en raison d’un contrat accepté sur les réseaux sociaux, ce n’est pas normal.” But these “job offers” come to kids via social media, and must often be taken up by kids whose parents are too overworked or otherwise distracted to pay attention to what their kid is doing on his phone.

  Ian, MarcG, Tim S., and 3 others are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • jeather 12:29 on 2026-01-03 Permalink

    Also, teens are really good at hiding stuff and are, as a group, dedicated to figuring out new ways to get past rules and technology.

  • Kate 13:34 on 2026-01-03 Permalink

    I wonder whether they think of warning parents to ask questions if their high school kid suddenly has new clothes or electronics that they shouldn’t have been able to afford.

  • jeather 15:23 on 2026-01-03 Permalink

    Are these parents who are immigrants, don’t speak great French, and rely on their kids to translate because we all know the schools and police won’t help communities in other languages? I know something similar is happening in Sweden, where children are also not easily held criminally responsible, and the gangs look for immigrants and children in group homes as easier marks (though they also will recruit anyone). This is not because immigrants or children in group homes are more criminal, it’s because — and this will sound familiar — there is increased inequality, young boys in particular are failing at school, unemployment is high where they live, etc.

  • Kate 11:04 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    jeather, that’s good analysis.

  • Joey 15:47 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    +1 jeather

    Do I have the right? The decline of the Mafia in Montreal created a vacuum that lots of different criminal groups are trying to fill. These gangs are diverse in lots of ways – ethnic composition, linguistic background, international connections to organized crime, ‘professionalism,’ etc. They all seem to have figured out that if they hire kids to do most of their street crime, assuming that the kids who get caught will either be too scared of retribution from their gang to flip – or not scared enough of the relatively light sentences we give to children to cooperate with police (plus these gangs have a strong presence in the prison system, which would further dissuade any kind of cooperation).

    The interventions the cops are describing here all seem fine – it takes a village, yada yada – but it seems to me there are two ways to make a real dent here: significantly increase the penal structure for kids (fat chance) or actually dismantle organized crime (fat chance part two). Is it fair to assume things won’t improve until the mob war ends and there’s a dominant criminal player like in the good old days? So much of the street violence described here seems to be not much more than turf battles for protection money.

  • Tim S. 18:01 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    Option 3) Meaningful regulation of social media

    Yes, I know it won’t solve all problems, but it’s remarkable how it isn’t even discussed as an option.

  • MarcG 08:55 on 2026-01-05 Permalink

    Curious to see how it plays out in Australia

  • Ian 20:57 on 2026-01-05 Permalink

    We all know how obedient teens are and completely unaware of how the internet works & can be manipulated, I am sure tAustralia’s legislation will work 100% as intended.

    In other news, streaming killed the golden goose and content/ signal piracy is back but whatevs, YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR haha

• Kate 11:00 on 2026-01-03 Permalink | Reply  

  This year will see the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Olympics.

  TVA looks back to the construction of the Olympic stadium as a great achievement, with no criticism of the choice of architect or the expense and difficulty of its construction and maintenance. Even Quebec’s takeover of the project from the city (and its tendency, ever since, to keep the city on a short leash) is mentioned without comment.

  Le Devoir’s looking at the cultural and sports events planned to celebrate (?) the anniversary. At least Marco Fortier is more forthright about the problems, noting the $870 million being spent on renovations, and dryly adding that the work being done means that no anniversary parties will be held in the stadium itself, because it’s closed till 2028.

  The recent news that not a single Quebec‑born player was selected for the Canadian hockey team set for the 2026 Winter Olympics might be making some in Quebec City brood about funding for sports again, although I’m not confident about the CAQ’s ability to organize a pickup game, let alone a province‑wide hockey training strategy.

  Bill, Joey, GC, and 3 others are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Kevin 15:13 on 2026-01-03 Permalink

    I just read How Big Things Get Done, and it repeatedly cites Montreal’s Olympics as an example of how to guarantee a project will go off the rails. (New tech! New designer! Never-before-seen design! Unexperienced team building design!)

    While reading I kept thinking of the Troisieme Lien and how the idea of the biggest tunnel in the world is guaranteed to fail.

  • bob 17:39 on 2026-01-03 Permalink

    We forget what a miracle of wealth redistribution the Big Owe has been. All that money that we paid and continue to pay has to go somewhere. So think of the mandarins and mafiosi and sundry grifters and pols and carpetbaggers who bought new boats, or swimming pools, or brand new Cadillacs. Fifty years later, and it sits empty and unused – and *still generates cash flow*! An economic cornucopia, just not for you.

  • Ephraim 09:43 on 2026-01-04 Permalink

    Kevin – People also seem to forget that the 1976 Olympics followed the 1972 Munich Olympics disaster, which also meant that the costs of security and buildings with high security were also a concern.

    But of course, we constantly dismiss the costs of terrorism in our society. We spend billions to avoid terrorism, rather than actually attack the problem at the root and stop it. And allow countries to support it with no sanctions. (Countries like Qatar that serve as safe havens)

  • Kevin 15:00 on 2026-01-05 Permalink

    Ephraim
    The security costs were minimal compared to the explosion of the construction budget. The ’76 Games were more than 700% over budget and the tower was only finished 11 years after the games ended.

    And we still spend ludicrous amounts of money on this useless stadium because of misplaced pride.

  • Joey 20:00 on 2026-01-05 Permalink

    @Kevin I think it’s more sunk-cost fallacy than misplaced pride (or to save face) – we’ve *already* spent XX billions on this thing, what’s a few hundred million more is just a rounding error and besides, if we don’t pony for more, the investments to date will turn worthless.

    Anyway, $870 million today would have been worth about $475 million in 1997, when the Expos were seeking about $250 million for a new stadium downtown. Obviously the province’s finances and the context were different then, but it’s interesting to think that for what we are paying now to extend the life of a terrible stadium that nobody uses (or event wants) that occupies an enormous footprint, we could have built a new park, kept our team around and probably had enough leftover to demolish the Big O (don’t start with the BS demolition estimates the OIB floated to forego an honest discussion about what to do with the stadium). Not to mention the amounts we would have saved in repairs and renovations during the past 20 years.

  • Ephraim 20:15 on 2026-01-05 Permalink

    The construction budget had to include security spaces that didn’t exist in earlier Olympic builds.

  • GC 10:28 on 2026-01-06 Permalink

    Joey, you seem to be suggesting that the Expos baseball team would still exist here if we had just built them a downtown stadium thirty years ago. Do you really believe that?

  • Joey 14:48 on 2026-01-06 Permalink

    @GC I think there’s a decent chance. When the Expos proposed a new park in, I think, 1997, they had already lined up about $60-100M in naming rights and sponsorships from Labatt. It’s reasonable to think that with that revenue and some kind of public investment in a stadium they would’ve found a rich local owner who could have bridged them to the next era in baseball economics, which has been much more focused on TV rights than ticket sales, IIRC. They weren’t a disaster of a team at that point and still had a fan base in Montreal. A new stadium/ownership would have meant (a) more money to field a team, and (b) a signal that better days were ahead. Instead we had a slow death over six or seven years.

    So – new stadium + new ownership around the end of the 1990s would’ve been necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) conditions to keep the Expos around. Keep in mind that the assholes at Major League Baseball would not have signed off on any kind of ‘save the Expos’ plan at that time that did not include a significant government contribution.

    All this being said, even if it might have made more sense in the long run, there’s no way in hell the Quebec government would’ve spent a dime on a baseball stadium in the late 1990s.

  • Bill 08:42 on 2026-01-07 Permalink

    Go watch the Netflix documentary https://www.netflix.com/title/81748607 the Expos were doomed as soon as Claude Brochu became president.in 1989, and then bought the team in 1991.

• Kate 10:43 on 2026-01-03 Permalink | Reply  

  La Presse talks to several people seeking shelter in the deep freeze that has welcomed 2026.

   

• Kate 10:26 on 2026-01-03 Permalink | Reply  

  In 2022, the CAQ passed a sort of anti‑woke academic freedom law, which one prof quoted here says was meant to manipulate public opinion, because there’s no crisis in academic freedom. Universities created the committees required by the law, but there has been very little call for them to sit or rule on any cases.

  The quoted academic, Francis Dupuis-Déri, also has an opinion piece reviewing how the passage of the law came about after a University of Ottawa lecturer was suspended for using a term that was considered racist. Outrage over this “censorship” culminated in passing an entirely pointless law.

  Some previous links to the story at the time.