Social housing reaching a deadline
Social housing here and elsewhere in Canada is facing a crisis as federal guarantees made 25 years ago lapse. I note that there’s not even a sentence here that suggests the current federal government might be asked to reinstate the grants.
Robert J 10:27 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
I would be curious to know what kind of rents you pay when you are eligible for social housing in Montreal. If you go on Padmapper regularly, you see that there is no lack of cheap rental property (by this I mean like its very possible to split 600$ of rent 2 ways and live in a 4 1/2) walking distance from metro stations (not in Ville-Marie or the Plateau, but almost everywhere else). Is social housing significantly cheaper? Why don’t we create some kind of housing service that takes advantage of these properties in assisting people to find them and sign legal leases (and reserve social housing for people who can’t work), and maybe a rent allocation system like France.
Cheap housing is available in this cities for the resourceful.
Kate 10:45 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
I am no expert, but I think social housing is mostly for people with families. An unencumbered single person can split a 4 1/2 with someone and live fairly well, more or less (not all apartments called 4 1/2 offer two distinct bedrooms). But take a single mom, she can’t cram her kids and herself into half of a 4 1/2.
I looked at the Habitations Jeanne-Mance last summer and they looked so pleasant I checked into the requirements for living there. Having children is #1 on the list – being on welfare, being older than a certain cut-off age also qualify you to apply. Merely being a semi-employed childless bohemian is not enough.
Robert J 11:00 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
Ok. So let’s say you need a 3 bedroom 7 1/2 to live well with 2-3 children. I’d like to see the difference in rent payments between social housing and the average price of a 7 1/2 in say Ahuntsic, within 1 km of a metro station.
I’m not taking a stance here against social housing. I’d just be curious to see those numbers.
Kate 11:07 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
It would be hard to compare because while regular apartments have prices, in social housing you pay 1/4 of your income, so there’s no firmly pegged rent level. Given that rents have zoomed out of proportion to the income brought in by minimum wage workers, yes, the people living in social housing are almost certainly paying well below market value for the same space in even the more modest neighbourhoods. (There is also a big black market in employing people here below minimum wage, a story that really needs to be told, but that’s another issue.)
Robert J 14:05 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
Maybe. But Montreal has about the cheapest rent of any large, modern city in the world, and Quebec has about the strictest laws around rent control of any modern state. Rent is more expensive anywhere in Europe except maybe Portugal, and in America anywhere except Detroit. This is sort of like the tuition thing. We already pay so little, that any new initiatives need to be moderate.
Kate 15:50 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
Well, you run into a boundary where people are being paid lower wages than would permit them to live in even marginally acceptable conditions. Subsidizing social housing helps the tenants in the short term, but in the long term it really helps the business owners that employ people at super low wages. You’re enabling that to continue.
But if you pull the plug on the subsidies, it’s not the business owners who get hurt, but the tenants and their dependents who will then find themselves at the mercy of the rental market. Sure, everyone should demand at least minimum wage and decent treatment from their employers, but not everyone is equipped to make such demands, especially in a shaky economy like we’re seeing this decade.
That’s assuming some of the folks living in social housing work, and I’m pretty sure they do. There are cars parked in Habitations Jeanne-Mance. But it’s clear that some of the people living there are simply only marginally employable, if that – they’re recent immigrants, they probably don’t speak sufficient French or even English, they’re not white. What are you going to do with them?
Martin 17:50 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
Robert J is wrong on most accounts. He does not know for instance that 150+ cities in the USA have stricter rent control laws than in Quebec. He does not know that rents in Montreal are no cheaper than elsewhere once you throw in salaries and costs of life. He assumes that rents in the private market somehow reflects the value of the appartments, while in truth they are in large part determined by speculation (and therefore profits end up in speculators’ pockets) while social housing is cheaper because thre is no speculation (but there is plenty profits to be made, from constructors to banks and employers). Etc. Finally, rent in social housing is for some renters 1/4 of income, for subsidized apartments. For other flats, they are only the addition of total costs of financing the project divided by apartment size. Oh and one last thing. Social housing costs less to the collectivity than private housing, since there is no speculation involved. So the more there is, the better for all of us – well,almost all of us…
Robert J 20:15 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
Rent control in Quebec is peculiar in that there is no deposit (or key deposit), no asking for 1st and last months rent, and very few agency fees. I think this is excellent and assures a much higher level of mobility than in many other places. I live in France right now and renting an apartment is much much more complicated than in Montreal. You pay 1st and last, key deposit of like 40euros, and an agency fee (not a deposit) equivalent to one months rent. Then they check to make sure you earn 4 times your rent in monthly salary (that is a standard practice everywhere). For our small T2 (2 1/2) in Provence, we had to come up with 2000 euros just to move in (rent is 650– cheap for our area). I have friends in Paris who ended up renting in rooming houses with shared bathrooms 20k outside of the center, because nobody would rent to them for lack of guarantee. Most renters in France also live in fear of braking anything on the premises or even just pissing off the owner, because they know they won’t be able to get back deposits (imagine if you deposit like 2000 euros for a family apartment).
Now that’s a little extreme because France is small and property is expensive, but I think you’d find very similar practices in New York or Ontario (hefty deposits, no standard lease forms, agency fees, strict profiling). I know someone in Ottawa who had to get her mother as guarantor even though she’s been employed as university admin staff for 15 years. This is very very rare in Montreal.
As I said, I’m not against social housing. I just want to point out that the rental market is pretty damn good in Montreal.
Another point: I don’t think the agencies that handle social housing do it very well. Habitations Jeanne-Mance has had half a century to pretty up (and has done so beautifully nonetheless) but was a hole in downtown for a long time (high levels of drug use traficking mostly).