A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #339 - Saguenay: housing crisis and quiet gentrification (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

With lease renewals and the upcoming moving season, several thousand 
people will be victims of the housing crisis plaguing 
Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. As the newspaper Le Quotidien reported last 
January: "The 2024 rental report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing 
Corporation (CMHC) shows a vacancy rate of 1.3% in 2023 for the Saguenay 
CMA .» (1) It is important to remember that the balance point is 3% for 
the vacancy rate. In some places in the region, the situation is even 
more drastic. In Saint-Félicien and Dolbeau-Mistassini (2), the vacancy 
rate is 1% while in Alma it is 0.6%! In such a context, it is not 
difficult to understand who benefits from all this. Landlords have the 
"good game" by increasing rent prices knowing that sooner or later 
someone will agree to pay because they need a roof over their head, a 
fundamental right that is disappearing more and more. The famous 
capitalist real estate market is bleeding us. In this system, scarcity 
means increased prices and competition between people.

In Saguenay, the town hall is not doing much to counter the housing 
crisis. Between the wacky project of Mayor Julie Dufour who wants to 
build 1,000 housing units on land in the heart of downtown Chicoutimi 
and the financial aid that is slow to arrive for the Loge m'entraide 
housing cooperative project (3 ), there is not much flesh around the 
bone. Meanwhile, real estate developers and landlords are having a field 
day. Just look at the Horizon Development real estate project in the La 
Baie sector. The developers want to build 350 new homes with rates based 
on the current market price for new homes. But hey, one of the goals of 
developers, apart from "hoping" to free up places in more affordable 
apartments when people move to their new, less affordable apartments, is 
to attract and provide apartments for workers workers (for the moment 
fictitious) coming from outside the region in the case of projects (once 
again fictitious) at the port of Saguenay linked to the battery sector. 
The municipal councilor in the area, Jean Tremblay, takes the same 
approach and is convinced that such a real estate project will 
facilitate the arrival of major projects (4).

The housing crisis is helping to promote this project which will create 
new free apartments, but which in reality will not be accessible to a 
large part of the population because of the high prices. We need the 
construction of quality, affordable housing and not yet another 
apartment project whose aim is to line the pockets of 3-4 investors. The 
housing crisis is not fictitious. However, in this system, housing is 
just a commodity like many others whose goal is to make maximum profit 
from it. A way to make money by setting "projects" in motion. Obviously, 
when the goal is to make as much money as possible, low-cost housing is 
not attractive to these champions of capitalism. We need paying 
"projects" whose goal doesn't matter as long as the money comes in. Then 
there will be other "projects" that will still bring in money and so on. 
The right to housing is therefore left in the hands of "developers" and 
owners with private and not collective interests. The material of the 
counters and the "beautiful panoramic view" are more important than the 
accessibility of housing ($) and are arguments for increasing prices. 
And this is what it gives...

$500,000 per condo, who could say better?

In a popular neighborhood of Chicoutimi, Saint-Nom-de-Jésus, real estate 
developers had the brilliant idea of setting in motion the construction 
of luxury condominiums sold at $500,000 per unit. Another beautiful 
structuring project to counter the housing crisis in Saguenay... The 
condos will be built on land where there was a church not so long ago. A 
building built by proletarians and which, once desecrated, housed a 
skatepark, the Youth Center and five cultural organizations including 
the Lyric Art Society of the Kingdom. At the time (2018), the town hall 
did not want to renovate and buy the church. The infrastructure, which 
was already in poor condition, obviously continued to deteriorate until 
it was demolished. Instead of helping to bring this building to life 
through beautiful community and cultural projects, the town hall still 
leaves it in the hands of the private sector and this is what it gives: 
condos for half a million in the heart of a working-class neighborhood. 
. It is also difficult for such organizations to find quality and 
affordable premises, which accentuates their precariousness.

Remember that it is in this same neighborhood that rooming houses fell 
prey to flames a few years ago, causing the death of one person.

In Saguenay, it's free-for-all!

Between the proliferation of empty parking lots in the city center, the 
deforestation of the last urban green islands, the construction of 
condominiums, the loss of community and cultural environments, the 
glaring lack of housing and urban sprawl in the "ecodistrict" style of 
the Domaine Luxuor (subject of the next text), Saguenay has no 
structuring project to ensure everyone's right to housing. It is private 
developers and owners who dominate and do what they want, helped by the 
City Council. The propertied class which helps each other and robs us 
while the majority struggles to meet their most basic needs. That's it!

1. Solveig Beaupuy, Le Quotidien: Still not enough housing to rent in 
Saguenay

2. For this same city, the increase in rent prices was 11%.

3. Remember that the La Solidarité cooperative project is for 15 housing 
units, so it is not a pharaonic project to finance. Much less than the 
1000 units that Julie Dufour wants to build.

4. Myriam Gauthier, Radio-Canada: 350 housing project in La Baie: work 
will begin in the spring

by Collective Emma Goldman

http://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2024/04/saguenay-crise-du-logement-et.html
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