More social housing on municipal sites in Montreal

Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto To accelerate the construction of affordable housing, the City of Montreal is implementing a policy to facilitate the transfer of municipal land and buildings to non-profit organizations such as housing cooperatives.

Marco Fortier

Published at 12:36 PM

• Montreal

The goal is ambitious: to more than triple the number of “off-market” housing units in Montreal within 25 years. To accelerate the construction of these affordable units, the City of Montreal is implementing a policy to facilitate the transfer of municipal land and buildings to non-profit organizations such as housing cooperatives.

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Mayor Valérie Plante unveiled an interactive map Tuesday morning showing 77 sites set to house 5,500 off-market housing units in the city. Of this number, 32 locations (parking lots, vacant land or municipal buildings) are “available” or “under analysis” with a view to building between 1,650 and 2,100 social housing units — depending on the size of the units that would be offered.

Around forty other projects identified on the map have been completed since 2018 or are under construction.

This policy aims to accelerate the transfer of municipal sites at their book value—significantly below market value—to non-profit organizations that have received funding from Quebec or Ottawa to build housing accessible to low-income households.

“We have started a lot of construction [in recent years], but the housing crisis remains. The solution is not complicated; we know that it is to add housing,” said Valérie Plante at city hall.

“We are doing everything in our power to purchase land and buildings that will be transferred at their book value to non-profit organizations,” she added.

The city plans to dip into a $555.3 million program over 10 years (the ten-year capital expenditure program) to invest in the purchase of land and buildings to be sold at low prices to non-profit organizations for housing.

The metropolis’s objectives are ambitious: to increase the proportion of non-market housing from 7% to 20% of Montreal’s residential real estate stock by 2050. This will require adding 8,000 affordable units by 2027, 60,000 by 2034 and 161,000 by 2050.

More details to follow.