Plante vows to be ‘proactive’ over unsafe apartments
Calling the issue of unsanitary and unsafe apartments a scourge that affects one in three households in Montreal, Projet Montréal leader and mayoral candidate Valérie Plante presented her party’s pledges to tackle the issue Friday.
“Conditions can range from a window that never closes properly, letting in cold air, so the little one always has a cold, just to serious mould issues … the city has to be much more proactive,” Plante said at a news conference on Barclay St. in Côte-des-Neiges, home to many lower-rent apartments and new arrivals to Canada.
The party promised to double the number of housing inspectors in the city to perform 100,000 housing checks over the next five years, with a follow-up, which is often overlooked presently due to a lack of personnel, Plante said.
Finally, the city would create a public listing of problematic owners or slumlords in the city who don’t perform needed renovations.
The pledges would mean creating 20 to 30 new inspector positions, Plante said.
Last week, incumbent mayor Denis Coderre issued his party’s unsanitary housing platform, promising to increase the number of inspectors, publish a public listing of particularly bad owners and threatening to hire its own contractors to complete needed repairs that are going undone, then send the bill to the owner.
On the campaign trail Friday morning, Coderre and his team visited the Keurig Canada coffee plant and its 1,300 employees in the StMichel district to discuss economic vibrancy.
Later in the day, he held a news conference to discuss urban diplomacy and international economic development opportunities.
“This is the Montreal of tomorrow, this is the future. If we want to assure economic development that also respects social cohesion and sustainable development,” this is the type of factory that exemplifies it, Coderre said.
“You know, the real question today is we created 120,000 jobs in the last year, that we had the lowest unemployment rate and that Montreal is going tremendously well, and you have some living proof here.”