The city will join UTILE and CSU in creating affordable renting rooms
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre announced on Tuesday, Feb. 7 that the city will help finance the Concordia student housing in collaboration with UTILE (Unité de travail pour l’implantation de logement étudiant) and the Concordia Student Union (CSU).
Laurent Levesque, the general coordinator of UTILE, said the project has been in the works for six or seven years now. “The biggest challenge was to find land and find partners to help finance the project,” said Levesque. UTILE is a non-profit organization with a mission to help develop and promote co-op student housing in Quebec, according to their website. “The building will be ready for students starting June 2018,” Levesque added.
These affordable student housings will be located in the Plateau Mont-Royal, at 3499 Papineau Avenue in front of Lafontaine Park. The building will offer 80 units of different sizes, ranging from studios to two, three and four bedroom apartments. Monthly rent will be approximately $470 per student The housings will be available to Concordia students only.
Coderre was especially impressed with the different initiatives that helped with the creation of the student housing. “We strongly appreciate this community work. It’s created by the students, for the students,” he said. He did not fail thank the Concordia Student Union (CSU) for investing $1.85 million into the project. “We would like to highlight the enthusiasm and the engagement that the Concordia Student Union has showed since the beginning of the project,” Coderre said.
Overtime, the city will be giving $500,000 to the student housing project as it continues to grow. “It is the first time that we see such a big collaboration between the city, the social economy and a student body,” Coderre said.
“I think this collaboration with the city is very exciting and it is huge for the Concordia community,” Lucinda Marshall-Kiparissis, the general coordinator of the CSU, told the press. “From the beginning, this was supposed to be a pilot project for other universities and other campuses to realize that a project like this is feasible,” she said.
Montreal currently has more than 300,000 post-secondary students living in the city.
