Montreal Mayor, Valerie Plante, recently announced that even though the city is on track with social and affordable housing, it stills needs support from all levels of government. The mayor had given out a report card last week Thursday, October 25^th, on the efforts her administration had made to deliveranimportant campaign promise: create 12,000 social, affordable and family housing units within four years.

Some of the campaign promises pertaining to housing include home-ownership subsidies and the construction of subsidized housing projects. Mayor Plante said the city is already working to achieve that goal by constructing 6,000 subsidized social housing units for low-income residents 6,000 houses whose rent or buying price is not above market value by the year 2020. The only thing missing, said the mayor, is support from other levels of government.

“There’s no magic formula,” said Plante.

The plan is to build at least 1,250 social housing units a year for the next three years, she said. “That’s major when you consider that in 2017, only 500 units were built,” Plante said.

The mayor said a new by-law would be passed by the city in 2019 on social, affordable and family housing and a $50-million loan bylaw over 10 years to acquire property.The mayor noted that the need to improve on the city’s housing is quite great, and the city was working on it.

Montreal Gazette reports highlights of the stated achievements by the Mayor in the area of housing in the city.

• So far, 715 social and affordable units are under construction, and 100 affordable rental units are under renovation.
• Nearly 4,000 other social units are in the planning stages, including 3,000 currently before the city’s housing department on which construction will start soon.
• And 900 households have applied to purchase affordable dwellings, under a program Plante announced in April that provides $21 million a year to promote access to property.

The Quebec government had in March, said that it was giving provincial housing powers to Montreal, which meant the city had an autonomy over how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for the next five years. The government announced the transfer of $94 million to build social and community housing for low-­income households and people with special needs, and to renovate housing in rundown areas. And an additional $22 million in 2018 which the city was required to use to boost community and affordable housing projects that had previously been stalled owing to a lack of cash.

Plante, however, says that $22 million is not enough. She promised to schedule meetings with the three levels of government which would focus on formulating a federal-provincial agreement with Montreal on housing.

Plant held a meeting with Premier François Legault on Friday, October 26^th, and other topics seemingly took precedence at the meeting. Some issues that were intensely discussed at the meeting as reported by CBC.ca include developing the pink line and smoking cannabis in public in Montréal.