A city-commissioned report is calling for the construction of 60,000 housing units to be built in Montreal within the next decade.
The report calls on Montreal to provide $3 million in seed money to help accomplish the goal.
“This is a very ambitious goal that us together wants to create and we will put everything we can, the energy, the time, the financial resources, like, everything we can to accomplish that, but we cannot do it alone,” Mayor Valérie Plante said at a press conference.
Plante added that financial support also needs to come from the provincial and federal governments to help address the chronic shortage of affordable housing.
A housing advocate insists that $3 million from the city is hardly enough.
“This is far from being sufficient funding for social housing,” Cédric Dussault, of Le Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec (RCLALQ), an affordable housing advocacy group, told Global News.
Dussault is also skeptical of the role private developers would have in building affordable housing units.
“If you’re going to build new units that are non-social housing, they’re not going to be affordable for most of the tenants,” Dussault said.
The former president of the real estate division at Broccolini supports more affordable housing but says setting long-term goals is difficult.
“I believe we should always have an audacious goal but I always look at the short term,” Roger Plamondon told Global News.
Plamondon says there are too many variables to accurately predict long-term construction starts in housing.
“Let’s look at what can be done in the short term and how do we measure that to make sure we continually stretch ourselves and improve it,” he said.
The Montreal mayor also wants to reduce the delays in issuing building permits for housing to a maximum of four months from a current high of 20 in some cases.
“Our dedication and our goal and my message is that we are going to standardize some of the processes to make it faster,” Plante said.
Promises are being made while many future tenants wait for construction on affordable housing to begin.