Coderre pledges to build 50,000 homes over four years as mayor

He calls his approach “pragmatic” compared to the “dogmatic” style of current mayoral candidate Valérie Plante.

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A city led by Denis Coderre would have 50,000 new housing units built over a four-year period, the mayoral candidate said on Friday.

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The plan, which calls for 10,000 social housing units, would help cool the city’s overheated housing market and keep housing affordable for middle-class Montréal residents, Coderre said.

“If we want to ease the pressure on the housing market, we have to increase supply and diversify,” Coderre said at a news conference in the Gay Village neighborhood.

His administration would sell city-owned land to developers, cut red tape for building permits, and create a fund of at least $ 25 million to build social housing units in the first year, which could be increased to $ 100 million. for the purposes of the term.

Coderre pledged to pass a housing ordinance during the first year of his term that would require all projects of 25 units or more to reserve 15 percent of the project for social housing units.

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Coderre’s promise of 50,000 units over four years goes even beyond the plan announced by incumbent mayoral candidate Valérie Plante, who has pledged to build 60,000 units over a 10-year period.

He chided the Plante administration for its claims of having achieved the goal of building 12,000 housing units in the past four years. Coderre’s team estimates that only 3,900 housing units were built, compared to 4,100 built during his four-year tenure. Coderre said that many projects have not even left the drawing board, such as the Hippodrome (or Blue Bonnets) site in Côte-des-Neiges, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a 5,000-unit housing project on a piece of land. ceded to the city. by the province.

He said the statute of the Plante administration, which reserves 20 percent of all future housing projects for social housing, is “dogmatic” and has not resolved the exodus of families from the city to the suburbs. Rather, their approach is “pragmatic.”

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“We can see that the administration has not delivered the merchandise,” he said. “How is it that Blue Bonnets was not realized? How come nothing was done with the Îlot Voyageur, when it started in 2018? Let’s stop talking. We will do it “.

However, Coderre’s campaign was haunted by questions about Dan Kraft, a lecturer at the University of Montreal who was vying for a position as a district councilor in Outremont. Kraft was found to have made insensitive comments against a black man who complained after being arrested in Ottawa on the grounds that he was driving with an expired license plate, when in fact it was valid.

Kraft wrote on Twitter that the person in question was simply seeking 15 minutes of fame and was getting in the way of police officers doing their job.

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Coderre said the candidate has apologized, canceled his comments and is being given a second chance.

“It is unacceptable, but he apologized and said he would not do it again, and we agree with that,” he said.

Coderre was asked why Kraft can stay with the party while Joe Ortona, Loyola’s candidate, was fired for voting in favor of a resolution in the English Montreal School Board that questioned the status of Quebec as a nation. Ortona also apologized and the offending resolution was changed.

“It was a question for me, not just about the issue, but how it happened, and I made the decision,” Coderre said of Ortona.

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Reference-montrealgazette.com

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