Hanes: Beyond the moving day blues, July 1 has become a day of upheaval and heartbreak

Montreal Gazette

4 days ago

Another moving day has come and gone in Montreal.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the annual apartment shuffle was a marker of new beginnings: a fresh start with new roommates; a step toward independence for young adults; a merging of worldly possessions for couples getting serious; or a new wrung on the property ladder for growing families.
Now July 1 is often a day of upheaval and even heartbreak.
Despite desperate searching over the past few months, some Montrealers found themselves unhoused after the annual lease renewal date.
A week before the big move, groups that work with renters estimated 2,000 households across Quebec hadn't yet found a new place to call home, including nearly 270 in Montreal. The number of tenants at risk was higher this year than the 1,600 who hadn't secured a roof over their heads at the same point a year earlier. And groups were expecting grim new records to be set for people becoming unhoused this July 1.
Many of the unluckiest Montrealers will bunk with family or crash with friends until they can find something. Some will have no choice but to live in their cars. Others will join the growing ranks of those lining up at emergency shelters or camping rough on the margins of society.
But even for those who did manage to sign a new lease, moving day has become a source of enormous stress, as the scarcity and cost of housing exacts a toll. The crisis in the availability and affordability of housing now affects a wide swath of the population across Canada, both renters and buyers alike. And Montreal, once a city of cheap 3½s and plentiful triplexes, has not been immune.
Some sobering statistics were released on the eve of the annual moving day that speak to the depth and breadth of the problem. They show how Montreal is catching up with Vancouver or Toronto when it comes to the cost of housing. They also expose how much work it will take to return to pre-pandemic levels of affordability (never mind the good ol' days of decades past).
In a new quarterly report on rent prices, Statistics Canada last week revealed that there has been a surge in asking rents in Montreal since 2019. The average cost of a two-bedroom apartment is $1,930, up from $1,130 five years ago.
Montreal now ranks 17th on the list of most expensive Canadian cities to lease an apartment. It's still a far cry from Vancouver, where the monthly rent averages $3,170, or Toronto, where it's $2,690, or even Ottawa, where it's $2,490. But Montreal is catching up and prices could go higher — especially after Quebec's Tribunal administratif du logement prescribed a 5.9 per cent average rent hike for 2025. It also explains why moving day has been filled with such trepidation in recent years, because new leases tend to be offered at higher prices.
But simply finding a new home, regardless of the price, is also increasingly difficult. At the end of 2024, the overall vacancy rate was a paltry 2.1 per cent in Montreal. But it's even tighter in certain neighbourhoods or for larger, family-size units. That's slightly better than the previous rate of 1.5 per cent recorded in January 2024, but both figures are still below the three per cent threshold that is considered the sign of a healthy rental market.
The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation issued a report last week on housing affordability. The bottom line is that the amount of housing constructed each year needs to double in the coming decade to bring costs in line with income levels.
'Compared to a projected rate of about 250,000 new housing units annually until 2035, Canada needs to increase housing starts to around 430,000 to 480,000 units per year to restore affordability,' the CMHC report states. 'The need to increase the housing supply remains critical.'
That's an ambitious target that won't be reached without boosting the workforce in construction, upping private sector investment, improving technological advancements and incorporating innovations like modular housing to speed up development.
But how much construction needs to be sped up varies by region. Edmonton, for instance, is on track to meet projected demand. Montreal, on the other hand, is one of the cities that has the most ground to make up.
To build enough new housing stock to put a dent in affordability, Montreal has to almost triple construction, creating 72,175 new units a year, up from the current 23,287, the CMHC says. And if the pace doesn't pick up dramatically, real estate experts told La Presse prices will continue to soar.
There are other aspects of the report that are eye-opening as well.
First of all, the CMHC's measure of affordability is shifting.
'There's no settled definition of housing affordability, but it relates housing costs to income. In housing market analysis, a common convention is to compare the monthly cost of purchasing an average home with the average or median income,' the CMHC states. 'Unfortunately, house prices have risen so much in our most expensive cities that the average household wouldn't qualify to buy the average home under current mortgage rules. As a result, that metric has become obsolete.'
The CMHC is also tempering expectations about what affordability will look like — even with a massive construction boom. The report notes that home prices have accelerated since the pandemic. In Montreal, the annual rate of growth between 2004 and 2019 was 4.7 per cent. But between 2019 and 2024, it shot up to 10.2 per cent a year on average.
'Restoring affordability to levels last seen two decades ago isn't realistic, especially after the post-pandemic price surge. COVID-19 significantly changed the affordability landscape across the country,' the CMHC report states. 'As a result, we're changing our aspiration to restoring affordability to levels seen just before the pandemic.'
Considering the average price of a single-family home in Montreal reached an all-time high of $625,107 in May after nearly doubling in the previous decade, while the average condo hit $428,000, a 70 per cent jump from 10 years earlier, there's a long way to go.
Besides accelerating construction, what kind of housing is built will also be crucial to addressing the housing crunch, including off-market, cooperative and social units.
But since it takes years to get zoning changes, and another year or two to build, nothing much seems likely to change before next July 1.
Montrealers will hearing the moving day blues for a while yet.