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Every developer has opted to pay Montreal instead of building affordable housing, under new bylaw (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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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.

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[–] 24 points 2 years ago

I know of thee reasons:

  1. Affordable housing needs to be near services and work, otherwise transit costs make the housing unaffordable. Some affordable housing in Matagimi isn't helping, even if it's free. The attractiveness of those services and work make the locations valuable.

  2. It's not just luxury and affordable a city is trying to achieve, they ideally want all ranges of housing affordability mixed together everywhere. This mixture reduces segregation and promotes positive socioeconomic outcomes.

  3. The bottom up push for affordable housing (at least in Montréal) is coming from areas undergoing gentrification. So the citizen push isn't to stick affordable housing in very expensive areas, it's to not have affordable housing removed when the very expensive housing comes to them (Montréal examples of Verdun, Griffintown, and PSC). So your example of scraping one affordable unit to build two elsewhere still displaces an existing family/residents.

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