Why Montreal real estate is cheap - an alternate explanation

Montreal's reputation for having cheap real estate has been around for decades and is routinely attributed to our insane politics, political instability and other economic factors sprouting from that crippling abhorrence of doing thing the easy way.
   There's an alternate explanation that might deserve a listen, however.
   It is offered in James Lorimer’s The Developers, (1978) which claims that Montreal’s scattering of municipalities prevented large corporations from dominating the housing market.
   The big developers got their power from the federal government: Canada once was a country of renters, a problem somewhat exacerbated by the war effort, which led many to rush to cities with inadequate means to house that influx of workers.
    The government's  Wartime Housing unit tried tackling those housing issues before it was replaced in 1946 by the Central Mortgage and Housing and Corporation (first word later switched to Canadian).
   The CMHC gave favourable loans to developers, who received the largesse of tax loopholes for decades to come. The CMHC preference, under C.D. Howe, was to deal with big developers.
   Those developers became wealthy and powerful landholders and could actually dictate the way cities were built but Montreal appears to have been somewhat immune to them.
   So for example, while other cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary were being forced to live in high-rises, a set-up preferred by developers, most Montrealers were still living in much humane duplexes and triplexes.
   Lorimer also argues that the big developers found a way to gouge the consumer, noting that they would take a 35 percent profit off a new construction. Developers like in Calgary were charging $63,000 for a house in 1977, which was about $20,000 over what it should have cost, according to Lorimer's argument.
   That higher-price seems laughably cheap now as whoever bought that house would have made something like $350,000 or more on it by now but in fact some people lost out on the higher price because they simply couldn't afford to buy it in the first place.
   Lorimer credits Montreal's immunity to these evil trends to the small municipalities, which made it hard for huge developers to dominate large swathes of land.

Montreal (with Quebec City) is the only large Canadian city where corporate concentration has played no significant role in the suburban land development business so far. Why this is so underlines the key contribution of government in permitting and supporting this pattern elsewhere. Unlike most other cities, municipal government in Montreal is still highly fragmented.    

There are thirty different municipal governments with relatively independent powers over planning and development in the 191 square mile covered by a relatively weak regional government authority, the Montreal urban community and the full Montreal regional area of 1,032 square miles includes more than most other Canadian cities. It is the municipalities, not the developers, that install services to new suburban lots. The cost is recovered through local improvement charges levied in property taxes. 

While I appreciate Lorimer's research and efforts, many of his comparative numbers were taken in 1971 and 1977, one year after the FLQ crisis and the other just months after the election of the separatist Parti Quebecois government, both factors which probably went far in explaining why house prices were so much lower than other Canadian cities.