Two days before July 1, a dozen mayors of large cities in Quebec are taking up the request of tenant groups for the creation of a universal rent register in Quebec. However, a major dissent is expressed in the municipal camp: the mayoress of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, did not sign the letter.
“Ms. Fournier did not sign the open letter as she was unable to obtain evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed measure. In this context, she preferred to abstain, ”wrote in a text message her press secretary, Camille Desrosiers-Laferrière.
The absence of Ms. Fournier among the signatories is not insignificant. Since her election as mayor of Longueuil, the former PQ member has been on the front line to find solutions to the housing crisis. She was notably the co-hostess of a housing summit alongside the mayor of Laval, Stéphane Boyer, in August 2022. The summit had previously been the subject of a common electoral promise, something unusual.
The open letter from the mayors presents the rent register as an effective measure to counter rent increases, but does not provide any empirical data in this direction. The purpose of the measure is to allow future tenants to know the previous rent that was paid for the desired accommodation.
The mayors argue that the creation of such a register will “facilitate the negotiation of downward prices in the rental market” and “would help to curb the real estate inflation resulting from the optimization of rents”.
The Vivre en ville organization is behind the campaign to support a rent register. With a federal grant and money from Centraide of Greater Montreal, Vivre en ville funded the creation and operation for three years of a voluntary rent registry. It is this tool that the organization makes available to the Government of Quebec.
Keeping rents as low as possible is the best way to encourage construction, according to Adam Mongrain, director responsible for housing at Vivre en ville, a statement that goes against economic theory. “What the data shows is that the places where there are the least provisions to control rents are the places where the least is built,” he says, citing the cities of Vancouver and Toronto. . “You see more private investment in housing when costs are low,” he adds.
“It’s discouraging,” says Martin Messier, president of the Quebec Landlords Association, of the initiative from the municipal world. According to him, the current situation should encourage the parties concerned to stimulate investment in housing. However, establishing a rent register in order to limit rent increases will have the opposite effect, according to him. “It’s a bad idea to artificially keep rents very low, it would lead to a deterioration of the housing stock and the discouragement of investors,” he says.
If the implementation of the register has the effect of keeping rents low, private residences for seniors (RPA) will continue to disappear, comments for his part Hans Brouillette, director of governmental affairs at the Regroupement québécois des residences for seniors. “Over the past five years, 500 RPAs have closed, and an average of three per week have been closing since the start of 2023,” he said.
For Mario Polèse, professor emeritus at the Center Urbanization Culture Société of the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS), the presence of a register will not change the current situation, whatever the groups of tenants and owners. Basically, the price of housing is dictated by supply and demand. As long as there is a shortage of housing, there will be upward pressure on rents.
Professor Jean-Philippe Meloche, from the University of Montreal, adds. “I have reservations about the ability of this tool to address current issues. Vacancy rates being very low, because there is a strong demand and the supply is not consequent, people are nervous not to find housing. Nothing prevents consenting adults from negotiating outside of the price that was there before. The registry won’t have much impact,” he fears.
In a note published Thursday morning, the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) argues that the solution to the housing crisis does not pass through the construction of homes by the private sector. This claim is based on the observation that the rental housing vacancy rate has continued to decline since 2016, even though the number of housing starts has almost doubled between 2016 and 2020. The study does not say a word about the change in housing demand over the period. “The increase in the number of households does not necessarily require an increase in the number of dwellings, since shared accommodation is on the rise according to Statistics Canada,” replies, in an email, Louis Gaudreau, associate researcher at IRIS and professor at the UQAM School of Social Work. For IRIS, the solution involves stricter control of the existing rental stock and the construction of social housing by the government.
