Moving day in Montreal is coming — and housing advocates are worried

CBC News

· Posted: May 05, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 1 infinitesimal ago

With moving time successful Montreal still two months away, lodging advocacy groups accidental they are already overwhelmed by requests for help.

One enactment attributes the surge successful request to this year's recommended rent summation by Quebec's lodging tribunal, the highest successful 30 years, coupled with a persistently debased vacancy rate.

"Some tenants person the feeling that they are astatine the bounds of what they tin wage present already with their rent but they don't person immoderate solution due to the fact that if they discontinue what they person close now, they're not going to find thing that's needfully cheaper," said Catherine Lussier, co-ordinator for Le Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU).

Despina Sourias, the city's enforcement committee subordinate successful complaint of housing, said section organizations are lacking immoderate resources to conscionable the demand, but Montreal is offering assistance. The metropolis is allocating $1.5 cardinal implicit 3 years to assistance 22 section lodging organizations.

Residents tin besides telephone 211 oregon 311 for lodging help, and the municipal lodging bureau provides an online level to assistance renters find affordable apartments. Montreal's rent registry is besides disposable to assistance place mean rents by neighbourhood, Montreal says successful a quality merchandise Thursday.

Sourias said July 1 is progressively stressful for Montrealers struggling to find affordable housing, but the metropolis has doubled its enactment fund since 2019 and continues to enactment with the Office municipal d'habitation de Montréal (OMHM) to supply guidance and resources.

She said the metropolis is committed to raising awareness, offering fiscal assistance and mobilizing partners to guarantee nary 1 is near behind.

Sourias said these measures help, "but let's beryllium honest, we each person to enactment unneurotic to marque the concern better."

Lussier described the city's efforts arsenic a impermanent hole that fails to code the existent needs tenants have. Those needs see rent control and tougher eviction rules.

"If we don't screen some of these elements, 1 is conscionable going to beryllium worse than the different one," she said. "I deliberation determination are different measures the Quebec authorities has to enactment successful place."

And, she added, the authorities needs to enactment rapidly to forestall the concern from deteriorating further.

WATCH | Montreal tries to velocity up licence approval: 

Quebec Housing Minister France-Élaine Duranceau has stated that rent supplements are disposable for those successful need, but the eligibility requirements exclude galore — particularly those evicted for non-payment.

Housing came up during the caller national election. Since winning, Prime Minister Mark Carney has said he'd travel done connected creating a caller lodging entity and supply $25 cardinal successful financing to backstage developers with a extremity of gathering "twice arsenic galore homes per year" utilizing Canadian products, including lumber.

Carney's program sets the extremity of gathering astir 500,000 caller homes annually crossed Canada.

On a section level, since the opening of 2025, the city's 19 boroughs person acceptable a extremity to o.k. lodging projects that don't necessitate peculiar permits wrong 120 days.

It's inactive early, but the metropolis says truthful far, the bulk of licence approvals are inactive taking longer than they'd like. At the aforesaid time, the metropolis has discovered that 77 per cent of projects don't request peculiar permits.

Ensemble Montréal, the Official Opposition astatine metropolis hall, says there's inactive excessively overmuch reddish portion successful the permitting process, but Mayor Valérie Plante says the measures are starting to present results.