On the morning of the moving day, on public radio, when she was asked how many people are at risk of finding themselves homeless, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Andrée Laforest, said reassuring. “Honestly, it’s going well,” she said, urging people to turn to available resources when needed.
“We have taken all means”, she said, her government having deployed a $ 60 million plan to offer an emergency increase in the rent supplement as well as subsidies to municipalities for storage and cleaning. temporary accommodation. But since the concerns of tenants have been reported for months, and this, from the four corners of Quebec, he was asked the question again: is there a housing crisis, yes or no? No, she hastened to answer, there is no housing crisis. Everything is fine on the pitch, she swore, pointing out that she would have told us, if it went wrong.
Stories, however, line the pages of newspapers. It is not, as is often said, a whim of tenants’ defense associations. The figures are there, before our eyes, the testimonies too. Vacancy rates remain very low, especially for large units. The price of rents is increasing. Evictions are increasing. Discrimination escalates.
According to data produced in June by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation at the request of the Journal of Montreal, in Quebec, among municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, 8 out of 10 last fall posted a vacancy rate of less than 3% – a threshold below which housing is becoming scarce. About fifteen municipalities even reported a vacancy rate below 1%, reducing the availability of affordable housing to almost nothing.
As for the price of rents, the RCLALQ unveiled in recent days, for a second consecutive year, its survey on the price of rental housing, carried out on the basis of 57,000 classified ads posted on Kijiji between January and May 2021. In 2020, the same survey revealed an alarming gap between the rents of advertised units and the average rent compiled by CMHC, indicating a widening gap between the price of homes already occupied and the price of homes returning to the market. And this year, we see a new jump in the price of rental housing. For two-bedroom housing in a metropolitan area, we are talking about an increase of 16%. This trend has spread far beyond Montreal. In municipalities like Granby and Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, the average rent has increased by 14% and 15%, respectively. In one year.
This continual (and spectacular) increase in rents inevitably increases the proportion of households who must devote a third or even half of their income to housing, leading to a general impoverishment of tenants. However, this generalized impoverishment will not be corrected by the plan deployed by the Minister of Housing, which constitutes at best a temporary crutch for the most badly taken of all.
Added to this is the increase in evictions, and especially abusive evictions. In December 2020, the Petite-Patrie Housing Committee presented the results of its investigation into repossessions and evictions carried out in this neighborhood of Montreal in recent years. The results are striking: in almost three-quarters of the repossessions and evictions analyzed, it was revealed that the owner had acted fraudulently or maliciously. In the cases of “renoviction” or “demoviction”, the picture was even darker: all the tenants had suffered malicious tactics from their landlord. And very few of them were able to obtain success or compensation before the Administrative Housing Tribunal.
This survey is obviously based on a limited sample, but it nevertheless shows that the crisis cannot be reduced to the sole availability of housing. It also refers, and perhaps even above all, to the worsening residential precariousness experienced by many people. The dynamics at work in the rental market indicate a clear erosion of the possibility for tenants to access adequate housing and to stay there as long as they wish, as well as of their real capacity to exercise their rights. The balance of power enjoyed by owners, whatever they may say, is constantly increasing, and this imbalance is also at the heart of the crisis.
When the Minister of Housing insists on saying that there is no housing crisis, that all is well on the ground, she does not deny the reality. She actually gives us her assessment of the situation. She admits that it is normal, inevitable, even desirable, for people who do not have access to property to live in this way. Observing the current situation and concluding that there is no crisis means declaring that all those who are worried, give up their rights for fear of reprisals and are satisfied with housing that is too small and too expensive deserve what happens to them.