Housing Accelerator update, week 9
Agreements with Kitchener and Quebec
Previously:
Federal plan: London, Calgary, GST on new rental housing
Housing Accelerator update, weeks 2-4: Halifax, Mississauga, Vaughan
Week 5: Hamilton, Metro Vancouver
Week 6: Quebec, Kitchener, Guelph, Burlington
Week 7: Ajax, Moncton, Brampton, Richmond Hill, Kelowna, Edmonton
Week 8: Waterloo, Charlottetown, Winnipeg
Agreement with Kitchener
Three weeks ago, Kitchener city council voted unanimously to allow four units per lot. Last Friday, Sean Fraser announced that he had approved Kitchener’s Housing Accelerator application. Storeys: Kitchener reaches $42.4M Housing Accelerator Fund agreement.
$42M would build about 80 homes at $500K each. The three-year target is 1200 homes (15X as many), and the ten-year target is 37,500 homes (more than 400X as many).
Agreement with Quebec
In week 6, a tentative agreement was reached for the federal government to contribute $900M (about a quarter of the total Housing Accelerator Fund) to build non-market housing in Quebec, matched by the Quebec government.
In Quebec, unlike the rest of the country, there’s a provincial law which prevents municipalities from negotiating directly with the federal government. (Municipalities are creations of the province, so they only have powers which are delegated to them by the province.)
The details of the agreement were announced on Thursday. Sidhartha Banerjee, Canadian Press: Feds will spend $900M to build housing in Quebec, matched by province. The target is 23,000 additional homes, with 8,000 being non-market housing. This suggests that Quebec’s estimate of the cost to build a non-market home is considerably lower than $500K: the combined federal and provincial funding is $1.8B, which would build 8000 homes if they’re $225K each.
Besides the non-market homes, the additional 15,000 homes would presumably come from removing restrictions on building:
Quebec Housing Minister France-Elaine Duranceau said the province will work on regulatory reforms to reduce construction delays, including increasing urban densification and reducing red tape.