Last year, Élyse Gamache-Bélisle began collecting cans and empty bottles to collect deposits, in the hope of accumulating a down payment that would allow her to buy in her neighborhood, Villeray.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
A completely crazy project, a film script: the mother of a single-parent family who does everything to put down roots in her children’s neighborhood, she who has lived there as a tenant for 15 years…
Her real estate stress story, which I told in April 20211it is that of thousands of Montrealers, of thousands of Quebecers: the market is igniting, creating upward pressure on the price of houses, condos, plexes and apartments.
Élyse, 39, lives in a small apartment in Villeray. Shared custody of her two children with the father, who lives in Laval. The children go to school in Villeray, a few blocks from the apartment. Élyse has an excellent relationship with her owner.
But if the owner decided to sell, would she be “renovinted”?
And then, even without post-sale renoviction, her two children share the same room. They grow up. Teenagers, it will become untenable, this sharing.
This latent anxiety pushed her to action, hence this crazy collection of returnable bottles and cans, which has been going on since April 2021. Goal: buy the duplex next to the building she lives in. Or buy something in the neighborhood, so you don’t have to uproot yourself.
For 11 months, the story of Élyse has been often publicized, her hope of accessing property through deposit is a symbol of the very human effects of real estate escalation. Élyse hoped to both amass a jackpot to buy in the neighborhood AND spark a broader debate on access to housing…
In consignments, donations and garage sales, over the past 11 months, Élyse has raised $22,000, 19% of her goal of $115,000. She estimates that she has spent 700 hours on all of this over the past year.
But it’s over. Élyse is stopping her project next month, on her first birthday: “It’s as if I were running a marathon, but we always added kilometers before the finish line,” she told me.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Élyse Gamache-Bélisle collected empty bottles to finance her down payment to buy a house in her neighborhood.
These kilometers which lengthen the marathon of the access to the property, it is inflation and the blaze of the prices. Because the more time passes, the more the market gets carried away.
In one year in Montreal2 – from February 2021 to February 2022 – the average price of a single-family home increased by 20% ($550,000) and that of a condo, by 16% ($395,000).
At this rate, Élyse will never make it.
I know that people will read this column and think that it’s not the end of the world, the stress of Élyse. It’s true. On a scale of 1 in Mariupol, Ukraine, that’s nothing. We get along.
But even before Ukraine forced us to put all our problems into perspective, when I recounted Élyse’s quest a year ago, I received comments that trivialized the stress of this mother of family. Yet it is a widespread stress, these days, everywhere in Quebec: finding accommodation without breaking the bank, without uprooting yourself.
It is a stress that also affects the parents of adults who want to buy a first property: 20% of first-time buyers in Quebec have received help from their parents, a record, according to TVA3.
If Ukraine were not on fire and blood and if the pandemic had not monopolized our attention for two years, it is obvious that the problem of access to property – and to affordable housing – would not flash. worse on the collective radar screen.
As my colleague Stéphanie Grammond recently explained, the problem of access to property is a real break in the social ladder4. This breakdown is largely due to a chronic housing shortage in Canada: the housing supply does not keep up with the country’s population growth.5.
Too much demand with too little supply means skyrocketing prices. Basic rule in economics.
At the height of the macadam of the neighborhoods, it gives stories like that of Élyse, of the world which wonders: where am I going to live, without ruining myself, without uprooting myself, without moving away, our children and me, from all that is precious to us: support networks, friends, school, work, leisure?
Élyse: “Even if I haven’t been renovinated, my children share the same room. They grow up. I’m going to have to find something bigger so that they each have their own room, teenagers. When I look at housing in the neighborhood, a six and a half is $1900. It’s too expensive. And in two, three years, what will it be: $2,300, $2,400? »
Élyse knows that her dream was crazy. But she believed in it. At the end of the line, there she is thinking aloud, moved by the outpouring of solidarity she has aroused, wonders what she could have done differently, tells herself that she should have bought in the years 2000…
Then she changes her mind. In the 2000s, she recalls, there were other pitfalls to manage: “Unfortunately, life meant that I couldn’t buy, when it was buyable. »
There’s something like melancholy in her voice, when Élyse does the post mortem of his adventure. It strikes me, because when I walked through Villeray with her 11 months ago, she was the epitome of pep.
His disappointment is twofold.
One, she knows she’s at the mercy of variables beyond her control, which could sooner or later kick her out of her neighborhood.
Two, Élyse hoped that her story would provoke a kind of awareness of the issues of access to property and housing, she wanted these issues to be the subject of the beginnings of real solutions…
A year later, she became disillusioned: “There is the beginning of a rent register, but that’s all. On the one-upmanship from secret offers, nothing. On speculation, nothing. And the Minister of Housing, Ms.me Laforest, who refuses to talk about a housing crisis… What planet do they live on? »
His fight was also a fight for diversity in the neighborhoods, so that all kinds of people live in all kinds of neighborhoods. But you have to have increasingly high incomes to buy a house in Quebec. According to the calculations of my colleague Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot6a single person needs to earn $254,000 a year to buy a single-family home at a median price of $690,000 in Montreal, with a 20% down payment…
Who can afford that?
Not from the world like Elyse.
That’s a lot, a lot of people.