Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, an Architectural Icon, Arrives at a Crossroads

But for residents, it isn’t so much how the building looks that makes it revolutionary, it’s how it feels to live there.

“It is like nothing else,” says Marie-Astrid Lefebvre, a 36-year-old physician who grew up at Habitat and whose parents’ home is still there. “It is its own species.”

Now, the 55–year-old Habitat is going through somewhat of a midlife crisis. The building needs multiple phases of structural work, including concrete-density tests, a new membrane for the roof, a sprinkler system in the garage and concrete cleaning to head off any future issues.  The big fountain out front has been broken for more than a year. Management says it needs time to fix it in a way that respects the design and structure of the building. An increase in monthly dues (up about $114 in June to about $760 per cube) and a series of proposed assessments (the latest this year was $3,800 per cube) have been controversial, although management says more than 85% of the residents are fine with the increase.

The apartments are designed to resemble a hillside village, stacked, staggered and angled in a way that allows privacy. Each has terraces, access to gardens and a separate entrance to the outside through walkways. Shared amenities include clay tennis courts, garden space, outdoor areas with fire pits, a free shuttle bus and a parking garage that houses a small convenience store.

The 12-story building was originally designed with 365 prefabricated cubes, each 624 square feet, which residents have combined to create bigger apartments over the years, balancing individual interests with preservation requirements.

The roaring St. Lawrence River on one side, a popular spot for surfers, gives the building a resort-like feel, magnified by the chirping birds that careen through its outdoor passageways. At the same time, it is squarely in the city, located on a peninsula just across from the Old Port of Montreal and a quick bike ride to the center of town.

Close to Nature

Oliver Parini for The Wall Street Journal; Dominique LaFond for The Wall Street Journal (surfer)

There is also controversy over the future of Habitat’s community, spurred in part by the purchase of 13 of the total 145 apartments over the past year by a 28-year-old developer named Francis Brunelle. Mr. Brunelle is in the process of buying more units. He is gut-renovating many of the units he owns and plans to rent them out as luxury apartments.

Concerns about one owner having too much control—and the frequent construction activity—has led to a call among some residents for restrictions on the number of units in the building that can be owned and rented. The complex has an eight-member board and written by-laws that can be modified by a vote of owners—one vote per cube.

“We are up in arms about what’s happening,” says Linda Duraes, 56, who has lived at Habitat since she and her second husband, Eduardo Franco, bought an apartment for $330,000 in 2012. The couple raised two of the six children they share at Habitat. She says she values the mix of privacy and neighborliness and worries that too many renters could spoil that. “What if he goes broke?” she asks. “Our property values will plummet. Many residents are now wary of selling to him.”

Ms. Duraes has been knocking on doors, urging residents to get involved. “We want to preserve our Habitat 67 heritage, not become luxury condos,” she says.

Mr. Brunelle, the developer, says he respects the building’s architecture and that his renovations at Habitat are a “passion project,” one unlikely to earn him much immediate profit. “Our goal is medium- to long-term financial gains. These properties are currently undervalued,” he says.

Because he is concerned with Habitat’s long-term health, he says, he is stripping his units down to the concrete to allow for updated forms of insulation and to help the structure better resist the elements. He declines to reveal the prices he paid, but multicube units during that time period have sold for between $610,000 and $1.5 million.

His goal is to attract “quality, long-term tenants,” he says, and to create more of a sense of community by adding more common areas to Habitat, such as a gym, a pool and a room where people can hang out.

Mr. Safdie, the architect, says he has no issue with a developer buying multiple units at Habitat and renovating them. But he does have an issue with renting them. “What has characterized Habitat from the outset is the commitment of ownership, which assures long-term residency,” he says. “Rental by definition suggests mobility and can be detrimental to successful community life, as Habitat has exemplified.”

David De Santis, 60, a real-estate broker with Westmount Realty who lives at Habitat and sells apartments there, says it is hard to predict how the debate over limiting ownership and rentals will go. “We will have a good, healthy discussion,” he says. He points out that Habitat started as a rental property.

Safdie at Work

Moshe Safdie examines a mock-up of Habitat 67 in 1966, when he was an architecture student at McGill University in Montreal. It was built for Montreal’s Expo 67 world’s fair. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images (Safdie); Getty Images (Habitat67

Based on Mr. Safdie’s student thesis at McGill University in Montreal, Habitat was part of Expo 67, which celebrated the 100^th anniversary of Canada’s confederation with the theme “Man and His World.” Each dwelling at Habitat was designed with its own garden on the roof of the unit below, had ample views and was served by so-called streets in the sky (the walkways). The intention was to provide the benefits of suburban living in the city. The motto was “For Everyone a Garden,” says Mr. Safdie.

Mr. Safdie has found a global reception for his concept of the garden as a central feature, including projects such as Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore, Raffles City in Chongqing, China, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. In Jerusalem, he designed the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum.

His Habitat 67 design, he says, drew from a range of influences: the gardens and Mediterranean stone buildings in the village hillsides of his childhood in Haifa (now part of Israel), the social organization of bees learned from a school project and his father’s Studebaker car. He also was influenced by the modernist international style, which he says insists that architecture must benefit all—an idea that he says resonated with the values he had learned from living on a kibbutz.

Mr. Safdie, now 84, owns a 10th floor, four-cube apartment, with views of downtown Montreal and the St. Lawrence River.  His unit has been restored to something of a time capsule, with its original one-piece fiberglass bathrooms, parquet maple floors and galley kitchen. It is unfurnished (Mr. Safdie lives in Boston), but it is used for public events and guided tours. Mr. Safdie announced in August that it will become part of the archives he donates to McGill University to serve artists-in-residence and for exhibitions and symposia.

In 1986, the Canadian government sold Habitat to a local businessman who then resold it to its tenants for about 13 million Canadian dollars. A two-cube, 1,200-square-foot apartment would have cost about C$73,000 at the time, says George Boynton.

Mr. Boynton has lived at Habitat with his wife, Christine Boynton, for 44 years. They were on a waiting list for five years before they could rent an apartment in 1978, he says.

In recent years, prices at Habitat have soared, with two-cube units now going for about US$610,000 compared with about $381,000 just six years ago, says Robert Stephen Lefebvre, Ms. Lefebvre’s father and a real-estate broker with Groupe Sutton-Sur l’Île Inc. He says 26 apartments sold in 2021—a record high at a building where annual sales volume has fluctuated between six and 14 apartments for decades.

Isabelle Hallé, 55, who is in healthcare communications, has lived at Habitat 67 for nearly 10 years. She has listed her three-cube unit for about $1.37 million because she is moving to a lake north of Montreal. Living at Habitat, she says, “makes you feel part of something bigger than just living in a condo.  It makes you feel part of history.”

Ms. Hallé says she won’t sell her apartment to a developer because she feels that allowing any one person to buy too many units could ruin the character of Habitat.

The Life of Habitat 67

Habitat started as a rental property. It was part of Expo 67, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Canada’s confederation with the theme ‘Man and His World.’

Dexter Peart, however, says that even though Habitat is going through a transformation, with younger people moving in, he doesn’t think anything, including a developer, can change the feel of the community. “The energy of Habitat is set. It’s peaceful. Everyone gets to use the space as they see it,” he says.

Mr. Peart, 50, who founded a design company, and his wife, Maria Varvarikos Peart, 46, who owns a public-relations concern, bought their three-cube apartment in 2006 for about $446,000 the morning after they first saw it. “It was always a dream of mine to live there,” says Ms. Varvarikos Peart.

The couple, who have two daughters, now 11 and 9, have renovated their apartment, putting in an extra bedroom, a library and an open kitchen. They thought about moving to a house, but couldn’t bear to leave. Mr. Peart says his children don’t want to go either. His older daughter has asked if they would get another unit just for her, he says.

“This says a lot about who I am and who I want to be,” says Mr. Peart. “There’s a certain pride in living somewhere designed for a purpose, where everyone has a right to green space and light.”

Most of the residents seem to agree that Habitat 67 is worth the work and money it requires to maintain its iconic architectural position, not just in Montreal but in the world.

As for the architect, Mr. Safdie says he is pessimistic about the possibility of another Habitat-like building in North America, in part because developers aren’t willing to take a risk or pay the price for such a deviation from the norm. Replications of Habitats he designed for New York and Puerto Rico never materialized due to financial reasons. “I find it terribly frustrating,” he says.

Write to Nancy Keates at Nancy.Keates@wsj.com