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| Proposed Royalmount Mall housing |
Purchasing a house or condo has become an impossible task in Montreal and much of Canada. Not only is every property insanely-priced but each receives dozens of offers, leaving countless hopefuls out of luck.
And yet many elected municipal officials have been attempting to block and discourage developers from creating much-needed units to solve this crisis.
The anecdotal evidence of astronomical housing prices is jaw-dropping. An 18-foot wide duplex I bought for $75,000 in 1996 and owned for a few years was recently put up for sale for $1.8 million.
The recently-released demographia median-multiple study now categorizes Montreal as severely unaffordable, as it now takes 6.6 years of the full amount of the median Montreal salary to purchase the median-priced household. In past years it only took around four years of full salary to pay off a house.
Demand for houses has far outstripped supply but the solution is simple: build more homes.
Politicians are blocking this solution by opposing housing projects even when these projects would offer them a lot of benefits.
Take for example the Royalmount Mall project's attempt to build 3,200 housing units in its commercial project.
The project would not bother TMR residents one bit, as it sits in a corner of the municipality far from all homes. And those condos would add something like $10 to $13 million to its budget through municipal taxes.
But TMR now wants to to block those new homes for obscure reasons while others in the west end object to it because they think the new settlers would bring more motor-car traffic to the nearby Decarie Expressway.
Of course the Decarie will eventually become busier eventually anyway as the much-needed housing will get built further out into the suburbs and those drivers will not only fill the Decarie, they'll also fill many other kilometers of roadway on their longer-driving commutes.
TMR Mayor Peter Malouf has embraced the bizarre stance of opposing the Royalmount housing project in spite of the fact that it would pay for much more new infrastructure to be built in his area.
One TMR insider explained that some TMR residents oppose the Royalmount residents as they fear having to "accommodate cohabitation of residential and industrial west of Decarie," and undermining their Garden City concept with these new residents. These underwhelming and obscure objections make no sense, of course.
The City of Montreal has also constantly opposed the Royalmount project. They have been major offenders in the housing crisis by detering developoment, derailing proposed projects by demanding charity units for the poor and by freezing a giant chunk of land in the West Island for a massive nature park.
The benefits of increasing population density in the city is routinely overlooked. For example groceries and other services become much more affordable in a busier area because those same grocery stores in a well-populated spot can sell a lot more items and charge less. Public transit runs more frequently in well-populated areas and getting places by foot or bike is also a lot easier.
Nonetheless citizens keep pushing for irrational NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) and BANANA (build-absolutely-nothing-anywhere-near-anything) policies, including more recently in Point St. Charles where many are opposiing a new housing project for nebulous reasons, as well as another such thing in Pointe Claire.
Canada's PM Justin Trudeau has failed miserably in his vow to make housing more affordable, but then again he has failed miserably at everything.
Municipalities, however, have direct power over municipalities. The provincial premier lords over activities from different cities and he has the power to impose his rule.
Canada's housing crisis could be significantly addressed if provincial premiers rewarded municipalities for attracting large developments and punished those which refuse them.