Montreal has a bylaw that came into effect on April 1, 2021 and that requires developers to contribute to the city's supply of social, affordable, and family housing. (All three of these have their own definition.)

Developers can meet this requirement in a number of different ways:

• They can build the social, affordable, and/or family housing

• They can contribute land or a building

• Or they can pay cash-in-lieu

Usually, I think of inclusionary zoning as being the first of these three bullet points: a hard requirement to build a certain amount of non-market housing. That is not an absolute requirement here, and so I see this policy as being IZ lite.

Since the bylaw came into force, there have been approximately 150 new projects by private developers in Montreal, according to this CBC article. That has resulted in about 7,100 new market-rate homes. At the same time, it has resulted in exactly zero non-market homes.

From what I can tell from the article, every single developer has opted for option three: pay the cash-in-lieu instead of actually building the housing. Supposedly this has produced about $24.5 million in new fees, which sounds like a lot. But if you divide it by 7,100 homes, it isn't all that much: just under $3,500 for each new home.

So what is clear is that this is the least expensive option. That's why everybody is choosing it. If the fee was significantly higher and it was cheaper to just build the social/affordable/family housing, then every developer would just do that. This is how development pro formas work.

But at the end of the day, we are still taxing new housing and new home consumers for the purpose of trying to create a smidgen of more affordable housing. And this has never sat well with me, especially considering that there are plenty of other things that we could be doing to make new housing more affordable for everyone.