Reduced rents
and red tape

>> Access to subsidized apartments
tough for the most needy

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The most desperate of the local poor are being shunned by the government housing body that should be helping them, according to landlord and immigrant groups. While private landlords are hit with increasingly strict restrictions on what they can ask local tenants, applicants for government-run, low-cost housing still have to jump through bureaucratic hurdles and pass rigorous status checks that serve to keep many needy applicants out, they say.

“The people who need public housing most are the ones who don’t qualify,” says landlord Giuliano D’Andrea, who represents 50 members of the Bedford-Goyer-Barclay Property Owners Association. “I’ve heard a lot of landlords bitch about this because they’re the ones forced to take the risk [on tenants]. In the latest government communiqué, landlords are told that we can only ask the name and phone number of the old landlord. But meanwhile, the public housing authorities ask for all sorts of information from those who want to get in their units, and they maintain strict criteria on who’s eligible.”

To apply for public housing, one must be 18, have proof of income and residence, must have lived within the Montreal Metropolitan Community for 12 of the past 24 months and come up with a letter from their landlord certifying that they’re up to date on their current rent. Most contentiously, the applicant must be a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident. The last criteria weeds out refugee claimants from the subsidized apartment hunt.

“Right now, new refugee claimants pile into tiny one-and-a-halfs with a bunch of others. They tend to live in very dramatic conditions,” says Stephan Reichhold, director of the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes refugiées et immigrantes, an association of 130 refugee and immigrant aid groups. “Once a refugee is accepted, it can take a year or two before they become landed immigrants, and during this time these claimants should certainly be given access to public housing.” Reichhold says that provincial authorities have promised changes to allow refugees to access public housing, but doesn’t know when, or if, that will come through.

The strict criteria for eligibility to the units exist “because it involves government subsidies,” according to Esther Giroux, rental director of the Montreal’s downtown subsidized housing division.

Meanwhile, other recent changes have made it more difficult for other local applicants to get a subsidized housing unit. Since last summer, all residents of the Montreal Metropolitan Community, which includes anybody living in a giant radius of off-island towns, can apply to live in subsidized housing anywhere within the region. The result is a rush of 3,000 new demands from off-island residents to settle in Montreal.
The waiting list for the 24,700 on-island units sits at around 12,000, up from the usual 9,000 or 10,000 in years past, making for a delay of one to five years, depending on the sector in which an applicant wants to live. Waiting lists could be lengthened soon by a flagging turnover rate. Residents of public housing are moving out less frequently, according to Giroux, who reports that the annual turnover in subsidized housing has decreased from 10 to 8 per cent this year. :