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.
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