Montreal seeks developer to build 700 housing units on site of derelict downtown bus terminal

The city of Montreal announced Friday it was seeking a developer to build as many as 700 social and affordable housing units on the site of a derelict bus terminus in the heart of downtown.

The site, known as the Îlot Voyageur Sud, has been vacant and abandoned for years despite repeated attempts to develop it.

But this time, Benoit Dorais, the vice-president of Montreal's executive committee, said at a morning new conference, the city is determined to see the project through.

"What you see behind me can't stay," Dorais said, referring to an image of the site as it currently is: empty, covered in tarps and falling apart.

"The old buildings that are there don't work with our game plan."

That game plan is to attack rising rents in Montreal with a development centred around affordable and social housing units, Dorais said.

But to do that, the city will need a developer to take the reins. The city acquired the property in 2018 after a series of failed development attempts including one by the nearby Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

It continued to languish, however, but now, to accelerate development, the city is offering the property to developers at a fraction of its market price.

The former bus terminal is located in the heart of the downtown core, near the Berri-UQAM Metro station, UQAM, CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal, the Grande Bibliothèque, and Émilie-Gamelin place.

A call for tenders will be posted in the coming weeks, Dorais said, and the city hopes to have a developer step in to begin construction as soon as 2025.

Tents sit in the empty bus terminus at Îlot Voyageur on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada )

The city's vision for the project includes commercial space on the ground floor with residences above.

Rents, even for the commercial spaces, should be reasonable, Mayor Valérie Plante said.

"We don't want the commercial viability to come at the expense of the development of social and affordable housing," she said.

The opposition at city hall criticized the Plante administration's decision to propose a project that included no housing specifically targeted at students.

"We know we have some organizations that are planning student housing in Montreal and we see this morning that the Plante administration didn't take that into consideration," said Julien Hénault-Ratelle, city councillor for the Tétreaultville district and member of the opposition Ensemble Montréal.