City of Montreal announces $21.4M in funding for construction of student housing units

The City of Montreal announced Thursday financial support of $21.4 million for the construction of housing units dedicated to students.

“Our goal is to give enough resources to UTILE to start many projects,” said Montreal mayor, Valérie Plante.

The funding will go to UTILE, a non-profit organization that’s been building affordable housing for students since 2013. 

The partnership will allow for the construction of 670 off-market housing units.

“This portfolio approach that the city is announcing today is a new way to finance non-profit housing,” said Laurent Levesque is Executive Coordinator and co-founder of UTILE.

“There’s the first order of impact of accelerating housing for about a thousand students in the next few years, we will be happy to build in this partnership. But there’s a second order impact of innovating and financing non-profit housing with methods that we hope will inspire other parties to follow with this new approach and hopefully accelerate dozens more of non-profit housing projects.”

The student housing projects will be located in Griffintown, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Plateau-Mont-Royal and Outremont 

This long-term partnership for the development of several projects was one of the recommendations in a recent report by the working group, Affordable Montreal Project.

“Loger Plus is all about that, how we want to accelerate housing projects and working with a non-for-profit organization that we’ve had a long relationship with and it’s working very well,” Plante said. “So, we want to support them and there will be more of that coming soon and it’s all about creating out of the market units, our goal is to reach 20 per cent in 2050, so we have to work on it but we’re positive, it’s a common goal.”