Montreal pledges funding for affordable housing project as rent rates rise

A 90-unit affordable housing project is coming to the Plateau neighbourhood in Montreal.

The City announced Friday it will provide up to $5.9 million to convert Manoir Lafontaine into affordable housing units.

Social housing charity Interloge will oversee the project in collaboration with the City.

Last year, Quebec’s rental board tribunal sided with tenants who took issue with planned renovations to the building.

Tenants staged protests after their landlord gave them a deadline to move out.

RENT RATES ON THE RISE: REPORT

The announcement comes as many Montrealers struggle to find a place to live ahead of July 1, a popular moving day.

Andre Drouin, who lives with an intellectual disability, says finding housing is “like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Drouin says he can’t work and collects social aid to pay the bills, but it’s not enough for landlords in Montreal to give him a lease.

“I even told one landlord once a couple months ago, why do you think there’s so much homelessness in the city? Why do you think there are so many people on the streets of Montreal? It’s because of landlords like you not wanting to rent to people on welfare,” he said.

A recent study from Rentals.com and Urbanation found rates for a two-bedroom in Montreal are up ten per cent from last year.

Experts say inflation, rising interest rates and a short supply are driving up costs. Many people simply can’t afford to buy, which is driving up demand to rent, says Mark-Andre Martel, a real estate broker with Sutton Group.

“It is possible that we start seeing bidding wars in rentals at prices that last year we weren’t seeing at all,” he said.

Martel is hopeful the market will adjust and sellers will be forced to lower their expectations, but there’s no telling how soon that could happen.

Higher interest rates will take some air out of the housing market, but that could be only temporary, says Moshe Lander, an economics professor at Concordia University.

“The longer-term state of Montreal housing is that prices will probably start rebounding later this year and continue rising for an indefinite period,” he said.

Another problem, says Lander, is the zoning laws in Montreal put in place to protect heritage buildings.

“When you’re constraining supply, then any increase in demand is inevitably going to drive prices up,” he said.