Two years after Valérie Plante’s administration said a new housing bylaw would lead to the construction of 600 new social housing units per year, the city hasn’t seen a single one.
The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet.
If they don’t, they must pay a fine or hand over land, buildings or individual units for the city to turn into affordable or social housing.
From the article: “Those fees have so far amounted to a total of $24.5 million — not enough to develop a single social housing project, according to housing experts.”
I don’t know about construction costs in Canada, but in many cities in the United States, 24 million dollars could renovate at least 120 homes, assuming a cost of $200,000 per renovation. Renovation is more expensive than building new. You could easily build 240 modest homes on undeveloped land with 24 million dollars.
I’ve left them half a million for administrative costs.
Montreal is a relatively big city, there’s not much undeveloped land just sitting around there.
Houses are not ‘affordable housing’ and definitely are not housing projects. Medium size apartment building can easily have 100 apartments. That’s $240.000 per apartment which would be considered ‘affordable’ where I live. I’m guessing in Montreal it’s more expensive so yeah, they don’t even have money for 100 apartments which would be a small housing project.
Due to the climate, houses need more isolation and heating that the typical US house. This leads to stricter regulations on house construction, which causes construction prices to rise even more…
Removing our reducing these regulations would simply allow promoters to botch the job without reducing price… So we’re stuck with these prices but have houses that keep us warm in the winter.
It’s Montreal, not Ice Station Zebra. $24m Canadian isn’t enough to build warm housing of any size?
Of course you could trivially build a single house for that price (The solution to the housing crisis isn’t lots of single family homes, its high density housing). But land is expensive and construction costs are high, 240 houses is waaaay overshooting.
It’s split between multiple developers and you wouldn’t get 600 units out of that total
It’s especially not worth it for them when you are wasting hours in the day working on that versus working on homes you can sell for over a million