Montréal,
In 2025, finding housing in Quebec, if you’re neither an heir nor a long-time homeowner, has become an exercise in contortion.
One must choose between taking on decades of debt far out of proportion to income, living with several people in a space that is too small, or leaving one’s neighbourhood, city, or region. For some, it’s an impossible choice. For others, there is no choice left at all. Every day that passes without structural action deepens these divides and jeopardizes the legacy we leave behind.
This situation is no accident: our “all-private” housing system, where social housing is treated as a marginal palliative measure, has reached the end of its lease.
The result: a destabilized real estate market, skyrocketing rents, and access to housing now reserved for those who can secure credit. Meanwhile, homeownership—long presented as the natural path to financial security—is slipping out of reach. Public investments, while not unlimited, continue to accumulate without addressing the underlying structural imbalances.
We are emerging from a Social Economy Summit whose shared vision for 2050 calls for a minimum increase to 20% market share for non-profit housing, an essential counterbalance for a housing system that is fairer, more sustainable, accessible, resilient, democratic, and rooted in local regions. This target is not an end in itself, as the Youth Wing of the Chantier de l’économie sociale rightly reminded us, but rather part of a transformation in the economic logic that views real estate solely as an investment. It is a shift towards collective entrepreneurship that responds to the essential needs of communities.
To repay the generational debt, we must invest differently
Through successive housing crises, the weight of housing-related debt has accumulated for future generations. Today, the majority of public investments, whether direct or indirect, support private residential projects whose value increases… without that wealth creation benefiting communities.
Yet every public dollar invested, every fiscal or regulatory lever, should be able to serve more than once. This is possible through non-profit housing models: non-profit organizations (NPOs), housing co-operatives, municipal housing offices, and land trusts—many structures whose profits are legally tied to their social mission.
The value created remains in a closed loop: it must be continuously reinvested into the creation, acquisition, or maintenance of housing owned by non-profit entities, homes that are more financially accessible for middle- and lower-income households.
Reaching 20% non-profit housing in the rental market by 2050 would, according to ACHAT estimates, require an additional 323,000 housing units of all types—an average of 12,920 units per year—a pace of development that must be maintained without faltering. Based on current average costs for acquiring existing housing and building new units, the minimum required investment is estimated at $153.29 billion, or an average of $6.13 billion annually.
Non-profit housing is social infrastructure, like health care or education.
Today’s youth are not asking for charity. But we must recognize that the status quo produces insecurity. It deepens inequality, drains communities, and breaks the intergenerational housing contract.
We will not repay this debt by adding up half-measures. The best way to succeed is to change the rules of the game. Investing in models that transform value creation into exponential levers for multiplying affordable housing, generation after generation. Housing crises are not inevitable; addressing them vigorously is a decisive act of economic structuring. Supporting the scaling up of the social economy is the beginning of a genuine repayment strategy built on a new Quebec housing model.