Mayor Valérie Plante says a new system involving targeted inspections of older buildings and the expansion of a voluntary rental registry will protect tenants’ rights.
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Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante announced a series of new measures Wednesday that she said will force negligent landlords to clean up their act and protect tenants’ rights to clean, safe and affordable housing.
Plante had promised in the last election campaign to require owners of buildings with eight or more units to be certified, and pay for their own inspections to prove their buildings were safe and clean. She also pledged to create a rental registry, to avoid abusive rent increases when a new tenant moves into a unit.
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While the new plan does neither of those things, Plante insisted she is not breaking her promises.
“Montreal is a unique city in Quebec for many reasons, including that more than half of our citizens are renters, which is not necessarily the case elsewhere in Quebec, so the housing crisis hits us hard,” Plante told a news conference Wednesday in Old Montreal.
“Each time I read in the newspapers about a family that is in a position where they are almost taken hostage because they are living in an apartment that doesn’t meet their needs, and that isn’t clean, it breaks my heart,” she said.
According to the plan announced Wednesday, the city aims to conduct inspections in 10,000 housing units this year, up from an annual average of around 3,000. The central city has added four inspectors to its team of 14, and the 19 boroughs will now have to give clear targets for the number of inspections they intend to accomplish annually. Each borough employs between one and five inspectors.
Instead of waiting for tenants to contact their borough or a housing agency to make a complaint, city inspectors will be conducting “preventive” inspections of buildings with six units or more, of which there are an estimated 19,000.
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If during this initial inspection of the exterior and common spaces of a building an inspector sees indications of neglect or safety issues, or if a tenant mentions other problems, such as vermin, this will trigger a “blitz” — a thorough inspection of every unit in the building.
Results of these inspections will be published on the city’s open data site so tenants can check them. The city will also issue fines and “deterioration” notices for the buildings; these, too, will be public, so banks and insurance companies that deal with the buildings can see them. Plante said owners may be threatened with losing their mortgage financing or insurance if they don’t quickly bring such buildings up to safety and cleanliness standards.
Inspectors will prioritize older buildings in vulnerable neighbourhoods for these preventive inspections, as well as buildings that have been the subject of multiple complaints in the past. A pilot project this spring targeting 90 buildings of 100 units or more is still underway. So far, 45 buildings have been preventively inspected; of those, seven — with a total of 930 units — showed signs of cleanliness or safety problems. One “blitz” campaign has been completed and six others are planned.
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While Wednesday’s announcement falls short of the promised obligatory public rental registry, the city said it will provide a grant of $30,000 to the Vivre en Ville organization to improve and expand its voluntary rent registry, which has been up and running since last spring. That registry allows tenants to voluntarily and anonymously post the rent they paid at a certain address, so that subsequent tenants can check that any rent increase does not exceed what is permitted by Quebec’s administrative housing tribunal.
Plante said her administration could not introduce an obligatory rental registry on its own without the approval of the provincial government. Along with other cities, Montreal continues to push Quebec to introduce a provincewide registry in which all landlords would be obliged to register their leases, so that tenants can check what previous tenants paid.
The central city aims to have its inspectors conduct 3,500 thorough “blitz”-style inspections in 2024, while the 19 boroughs will continue to respond to citizen complaints with a target of 6,300 inspections this year.
The housing critic for the official opposition at city hall, Ensemble Montréal, accused the Plante administration of breaking two of its election promises and grossly overestimating the number of inspections the city can complete in a year.
“Even with the inspectors that are being added this year, it would take 60 years for the city of Montreal just to inspect the exteriors of the buildings with six units and more,” Julien Hénault-Ratelle claimed. “I think we can all agree that is completely unacceptable, and it’s the same story with the rental registry.”
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