Last week, CIDI interviewed the mayor for the Town of Sutton, Robert Benoît, regarding the municipality's proposed acquisition of the former Vieux-Verger property to develop an affordable housing project after coming to an agreement with the owners to buy the land at $1.4 million. In the days following that interview, opposition has been growing to the project.

Two public information sessions were held on April 12 and April 26 to present the project to citizens. The public information sessions were followed by a registry held on April 29 for those that oppose the project to voice their concerns. Only 492 signatures were needed to determine how the municipality would move forward, but 784 signatures ended up being collected. As a result, the municipality will decide at tomorrow's town council meeting whether or not it wants to bring the project to a referendum or if it wants to shelve the project completely.

Over the last few months, Benoît has expressed that Sutton is facing a major shortage of affordable housing and that families have been leaving the village to live and work elsewhere. He described the proposed Vieux-Verger project as the last opportunity to bring an affordable housing development to fruition in the village.

Highlighting the challenges in convincing the “free market” and private companies to build affordable housing, Benoît said everyone, from citizens to the government, need to pull together to address the affordable housing “crisis.”

"What the federal government is doing is that they’re helping private companies subsidize the interest rates and to have lower interest rates for them (…) so they can offer lower rents in apartments. This project (Vieux-Verger) could be about 80 houses or apartments,” he said.

Following the two public information sessions, Benoît explained that there are some concerns over the lack of guarantee that the municipality will be able to negotiate for an affordable housing project and the use of public money by the municipality to buy land, but he views the project as a risk that needs to be taken to help the village thrive.

“It’s really the economic development of the village that will suffer if we don’t bring about affordable houses. Personally, I don’t think we have a choice. We have to tackle this problem because if we don’t we’ll be like other towns that are losing their Main Street, losing their people. We don’t want that to happen. We think we have a great village, a great town, we need to develop apartments,” he said.

The municipality's proposed plan for the Vieux Verger affordable housing project involves a mix of development and conservation.

“We had an architecture firm take a new look because this is a project that has been planned for the last 12 years but for different reasons it was never accepted. (…) The Vieux-Verger is located five-minutes from downtown and it’s a pristine area, it’s a beautiful area,” explained Benoît when describing the potential project.

“We want to conserve most of the site. The proposal is to conserve almost 75 per cent of the site in perpetuity, for eternity. We want to use only 23 per cent of the land to build roads and the housing," he added. "The other 20-30 per cent will be a park for not only the residents, but all citizens of Sutton.”

Benoît noted that in order to build affordable housing the municipality will control the price of the land and it will remain the owner of the land until it sets criteria to negotiate with private companies interested in bidding on the project.

“This is the issue that was discussed at the second meeting. Are people of Sutton willing to buy the land at $1.4 million? We gave a contract to an evaluator to give us the just-market value of that land. They came up with the idea that if they compare the price of the land to other land in the area, the value is $1.4 million and probably more than that,” he explained. “The owners did their own survey and found out it’s much more than that, but we negotiated and in the end they accepted because they already wanted to build affordable houses.”

CIDI will be following-up on this story with the Town of Sutton and Sutton residents that are for and against the project after the May 3 town council meeting.

Editors note: There was an error in the press release from the Town of Sutton. They will be deciding at June's town council meeting whether or not they will be bringing the Vieux-Verger affordable housing project to a referendum.

Listen to the interview below: