Dear Municipality: Affordable Housing Starts in Your Backyard

In short — No, a municipality cannot fix the housing crisis on its own — but it is far from a bystander. A Laurentides MRC created a community land trust that is building 68 workers' housing units in Mont-Tremblant; villages like L'Isle-aux-Allumettes, Grande-Vallée and Saint-Léonard-d'Aston won prefabricated buildings through the SHQ program; and since Bill 31, any municipal council can legalize accessory dwelling units with a single bylaw. Land, zoning and permit speed: three levers, all municipal.

Dear municipality,

We know. You don't set interest rates, or the price of lumber, or the SHQ's budget. When people talk about the housing crisis, everyone looks to Quebec City and Ottawa, and you're left managing potholes while young families move to wherever a two-bedroom still exists. Your residents have already made their priorities clear: in the Léger poll of September 2025, housing came in first among municipal election issues, at 38%.

But here is the good news — documented and verifiable: while everyone was waiting for the senior orders of government to act, municipalities your size have moved. Not big cities. MRCs, villages, second-tier towns. Here are two stories — and your toolbox.

The story of the MRC that built itself a land trust

In the Laurentides, the problem had a precise face: essential workers — the people who keep the restaurants, hotels and schools running — unable to afford to live in the very region they sustain. The MRC des Laurentides responded with a tool most people assumed was reserved for big cities: a community land trust for housing, reported by La Presse in August 2025. The principle: the land belongs to the trust, permanently; affordability cannot evaporate at resale.

First project: 68 units on rue Labelle in Mont-Tremblant, with leases signed directly with local employers and one floor of student rooms in partnership with the local college. Stated goal: 150 units in five years, the first building habitable in 2026, with sites already identified in Mont-Blanc, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and Brébeuf, according to L'Info du Nord. An MRC, not a ministry. That is the kind of financing structure our guide to funding affordable housing takes apart.

The story of the villages that hit the prefab lottery

Second story, even more counter-intuitive. When the SHQ launched its call for projects for highly prefabricated housing — standardized buildings of 24 or 36 units, designed to come out of a factory — who won in August 2025? Not the downtown towers. Of the 11 selected projects (336 units, deliveries planned for summer 2026), the list includes L'Isle-aux-Allumettes in the Pontiac — about 1,300 residents —, Paspébiac, Grande-Vallée and Cap-Chat in the Gaspésie, Princeville and Saint-Léonard-d'Aston in the Centre-du-Québec, alongside Coaticook, Granby, Lévis, Laval and Montreal.

That is not a coincidence: a standardized factory-built building does not need a regional contractor capable of running a two-year construction site in a town developers ignore. It needs a serviced lot and a municipality that says yes quickly. A second call for 225 units followed, for a total of 566 units selected. And the speed benchmark is Projet Acadie in Montreal: 26 modular units installed, completed in under 12 months, permits included, according to Quebec — with $1.9 million from the City in the financing package. (Why does the factory move so fast? We wrote a full article on that.)

Your toolbox, dear municipality

Let's summarize what these stories have in common: in every case, the municipality provided what only it controls.

Land. The Laurentides trust is above all a land story. In Rimouski, the City contributed $715,000, including the land value, to UTILE's project of 155 student housing units — delivered for the fall 2025 semester. Your inventory of underused municipal land is worth more than you think.

The bylaw. Since Bill 31, in force on this point since March 2024, any Quebec municipality can authorize accessory dwelling units — the suite in the backyard or above the garage — with a single bylaw. Québec, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Victoriaville, Baie-Saint-Paul, Nicolet and Sutton have already done it, according to Écohabitation's compilation. No subsidy required: a council resolution. (ADUs, community land trusts, highly prefabricated — the definitions are in our glossary.)

Speed. Projet Acadie came in under 12 months permits included — those two words are an administrative achievement as much as an industrial one. Prefabrication compresses the build; only your permit office can compress the rest. A non-profit waiting eight months for a usage change hearing loses its financing, not just its time — the guide for developers and non-profits walks through that obstacle course in detail.

We are not promising this is simple. But the excuse "we're too small" just died in L'Isle-aux-Allumettes — 1,300 residents and 24 new units on their way. And with a provincial election expected in October 2026, this is the precise moment when programs are looking for municipalities that are ready: lot identified, bylaw passed, permits expedited.

We've explained the crisis for the skeptics and documented it for your planners. The next shovelful of earth starts in your own backyard. Shall we take a look together?