How to keep young families in Montreal?

Home purchase tax break is good, but far from enough

It’s an evergreen question with an evergreen answer: How do you get young families to stay in Montreal? Well, it’s complicated. Perhaps more so than ever before.

Following up on a key campaign promise, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante recently announced a tax break for families wishing to buy homes in the city.

Starting June 1, 2018, a total of just over $21 million will be allocated annually to a program to support residential acquisition. It will provide financial aid for families with children under 12 years old, offering eligible buyers between $5,000 and $15,000, depending on the price and location of the homes. Previous home ownership incentives offered between $2,250 and $5,000.

It’s a positive first step, but there’s still a lot to do.

While Plante’s new program is designed to help young families gain a foothold into the housing market, it only begins to address the challenges they face once they get in there.

Let’s start with the obvious: rising property taxes. After promising not to raise property taxes above inflation, Projet Montréal hiked taxes for homeowners by 3.3 per cent in their first budget.

For the average Montreal home, valued at just over $427,000, that 3.3 per cent hike represented an extra $118 in yearly taxes, bringing the total to $3,729. It may not sound like a lot to some, but for families on a budget, this kind of stuff adds up. It’s one thing to get into the housing market. It’s another thing entirely to stay in the game.

Certainly, it would be helpful if the city were to renew its efforts to work with the provincial government to diversify revenue sources.

Second, there is the issue of schools. The Plante administration has been vocal about trying to get more families to settle in the downtown core.

But to make this happen, there needs to be a co-ordinated strategy between the city, the province and the school boards to ensure the development of schools — but also daycares and outdoor spaces for kids to play — downtown. The lack of inner-city elementary schools, notably in the Peter-McGill district, has been an issue for some time.

The fact that Montreal is thriving is obviously good news. As others have noted, our lower housing costs have played a role in attracting people here. After years of economic decline, Montreal is reinventing itself as a leader in the knowledge economy, a hub for Artificial Intelligence, aerospace engineering, gaming and technology. This creates demand for housing, leading to rising costs and competition.

Montreal is not alone in its housing challenges for young families. This is an issue facing cities around the world.

In the past, booming North American cities — including Montreal — were able to accommodate influxes of newcomers. Consider Montreal in the 19th century.

As new infrastructure, including the Lachine Canal, the Victoria Bridge and the Grand Trunk Railway, was built to support trade along the St. Lawrence River, companies and factories popped up in the area. Tracts of row houses were built to accommodate the droves of people and their families who came to the city to make a living.

I don’t want to romanticize that era. Industrial workers were often exploited, and housing conditions were not always safe. The point I want to make is that in the past, a booming city meant growth and the accommodation of workers and their families. This is no longer the case.

In today’s globalized economy — particularly the knowledge economy — work can and does take place anywhere. Too often, the cities with the most economic opportunity are simply unaffordable for the people who would benefit from it the most. For families, housing is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. So they turn to the suburbs. We’ve seen this in Toronto and Vancouver. Montreal is catching up to this trend.

Ensuring families can invest and stay in Montreal will require a long term, multi-pronged strategy that considers all of these issues. Twitter.com/ CooperCeline