It's not a fine, it's a price.

Just start seizing rentals already.

Yes, this is a prime example of why the neoliberal fascination with only acting on the market indirectly with tax/fee incentives instead of just making legal requirements or directly creating the goods and/or services the government wants is so foolish.

I'm sure there's a high enough fine that would make it more financially advantageous to build social housing, but there's also the problem of these developers be willing to take a hit on their very hefty profit margins if that means maintaining a "brand", so I'd wager policymakers underestimated the effective fine value by a factor of 10 at least.

I'd love to see the privileged try to live in a city devoid of any service workers.

Houses are not 'affordable housing' and definitely are not housing projects. Medium size apartment building can easily have 100 apartments. That's $240.000 per apartment which would be considered 'affordable' where I live. I'm guessing in Montreal it's more expensive so yeah, they don't even have money for 100 apartments which would be a small housing project.

Montreal is a relatively big city, there's not much undeveloped land just sitting around there.

Due to the climate, houses need more isolation and heating that the typical US house. This leads to stricter regulations on house construction, which causes construction prices to rise even more...

Removing our reducing these regulations would simply allow promoters to botch the job without reducing price... So we're stuck with these prices but have houses that keep us warm in the winter.

That's stupid. Outsourcing to private just doesn't work. Tax their money and build with it instead of making intermediates that will only take more money for them.

Becauae if you concentrate all your social housing in one "cheap" area, you end up with a ghetto

Imagine if only rich people lived in the city center and everyone who lives on a minimum or with a low wage over 1h away by public transportation.

Do you think people would want to travel that long for a minimum wage job in the stores, restaurants and cafés of the city center? I know I wouldn't.

We need to have social mixicity and affordable housing everywhere to accommodate the people who do the work of keeping these commerces working.

Right now downtown Montréal is on life support. Because of this. Commerces are closing everywhere.

I know of thee reasons:

1. Affordable housing needs to be near services and work, otherwise transit costs make the housing unaffordable. Some affordable housing in Matagimi isn't helping, even if it's free. The attractiveness of those services and work make the locations valuable.

2. It's not just luxury and affordable a city is trying to achieve, they ideally want all ranges of housing affordability mixed together everywhere. This mixture reduces segregation and promotes positive socioeconomic outcomes.

3. The bottom up push for affordable housing (at least in Montréal) is coming from areas undergoing gentrification. So the citizen push isn't to stick affordable housing in very expensive areas, it's to not have affordable housing removed when the very expensive housing comes to them (Montréal examples of Verdun, Griffintown, and PSC). So your example of scraping one affordable unit to build two elsewhere still displaces an existing family/residents.

A healthy city needs socioeconomic diversity. Not that long ago Montreal was known for cheap CoL allowing people of all walks of life to thrive. Putting aside the artists, students, and general eccentrics that contribute to the vibrant life of the city, we have to consider where the hell are our minimum wage workers going to live. I seriously don't understand how places like Vancouver do it. Does every coffee shop, fast food, retail etc worker commute 3hrs each way? What about the teachers, nurses, garbage collectors? Or do they all get paid way more and everything just costs a lot more?

There's a compromise possible and despite being a major city without lots of undeveloped land, there is still plenty of space reasonably close to the city where high density affordable housing could be. Doesn't have to be prime real estate right downtown. There just needs to be social will and courage to stand by the conviction that this is something good for the city. The truth is that like someone else said, the fine is too low and developers just see it as the cost of doing business.

It’s the same reason that homeless people are typically found in inner city areas, and not poorer suburbs. There are little to no amenities in poorer suburbs, amenities exist in more established and inner city suburbs.

Wow. Why shouldn't people of all economic classes have a place that's close to all the amenities and conveniences that cities offer? Why should they have to travel from outside the city for an hour to work, or school, or for entertainment? Why would you advocate for creating ghettos? Why shouldn't someone who works 40 hours a week at a