Housing crunch looms for renters as July 1 ‘bottleneck’ approaches
Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
The Ville de Québec is urging any renters who may be without a place to live on July 1 to contact the municipal housing search assistance service (Service d’aide à la recherche du logement; SARL) as soon as possible. The biggest moving day of the year approaches amid an unprecedented housing crunch, with vacancy rates near a 20-year low throughout the province.
“City employees will talk to you about your situation, what you’ve already done, what obstacles you might be facing, where you would like to live in the city and what you need to do. We can give you tools to find announcements or learn about the rental market or refer you to community organizations or renters’ rights groups,” said Marie-Christine Lamontagne, an organizational development and communications advisor with the housing search service, which is administered by the city and the Société d’habitation du Québec. “We are not there to provide housing, but we will stay with you until you’ve found a place that respects your accessibility needs and your capacity to pay. We’ll help you until you have a lease signed.”
Lamontagne said demand for SARL services had doubled compared to the same period last year. “July 1 creates a definite bottleneck, but over the last few years, we have been helping people year-round more than before, because people are starting to look earlier because they’re worried they might not find a place.”
Nicolas Villamarin is a community organizer at the Comité logement d’aide de Québec- Ouest (CLAQO), a non-profit which supports renters in the Sainte-Foy–Sillery–Cap-Rouge area, many of whom are students. “We [the CLAQO] can’t really help people search for housing, because we don’t have the resources – the SARL can accompany you, but most of what they do is help you search on Kijiji,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of options.” Villamarin said many renters are deciding
not to move due to the difficulty in finding a new place, and some rental housing is out of commission due to renovations undertaken before a provincial moratorium on evictions for major renovations went into effect in May – making the search even more difficult and expensive for those who must find somewhere else to live.
Long-term solutions
Although a new public- private partnership in social housing has arrived too late to help people in need of a new apartment this year, Mayor Bruno Marchand has said it should eventually reduce social housing waiting lists. On June 21, Marchand announced a new pilot project which would give private developers access to a subsidy of $2,500 per apartment per year to earmark apartments in new developments for social housing. Marchand acknowledged the program had come too late for people in need of urgent housing this year, but said he believed it was “part of the solution.”
Advocates for renters are skeptical. “We’re not creating long-term housing with this project – what we’re doing is subsidizing private housing,” said Marie-Eve Duchesne of the Comité populaire Saint- Jean-Baptiste, a renters’ rights organization in Saint-Jean- Baptiste, a historically afford- able part of Upper Town where rents have skyrocketed “exponentially” in the last few years, according to Duchesne – up to as much as $2,000 per month to for a 3 1⁄2. She said she would prefer to see different levels of government invest directly in the building of social housing rather than subsidizing the private sector.
“The housing crisis has been brought about by the private sector and the inaction of governments. Is housing a consumer good or is it a right?” she asked. “We believe it’s a right, and its availability shouldn’t depend on market forces or politics.”
Renters who are concerned about not having a place to live on July 1 can contact the SARL at 418-780-5211.