This week in The Press, I read Clément Robitaille’s story. Retired, he lived just opposite the park where I spent part of my childhood and some years of my primary at the Sainte-Bernadette-Soubirous school, on the edge of the Rosemont and Saint-Michel neighborhoods in Montreal. Clément had lived for decades in a dwelling. Seeing a photograph of his face, he reminded me of the gentlemen I saw as a child at the convenience store. Skinny, soft eyes. His building, after being bought in a dilapidated state, according to the new owners, needed to be renovated. This is the reason used to evict the tenants, including Clément, who until then paid $400 per month. He was unable to find a new apartment that suited his budget and, without a place to live from January 2021, he lived in his car for months. Until dying there of a cardiovascular arrest in July, in the middle of a heat wave. I thought of all the stages where society has failed to leave an elderly man to his own devices.
Clément lived in a neighborhood that was, until recently, sheltered from gentrification, but this example shows that it is less and less so. That the consequences of the gentrification of the city are deleterious.
Clément’s home is now rented for $1,400 per month. A profit of $12,000 a year for the new owners for the life of a man. Capitalism has long teeth and devours everything.
In the train that brought me back to the metropolis, two weeks ago, I noticed that there were makeshift camps near the railway line, and my heart sank to know that more and more people had to resort to such strategies. And even when you have an apartment, the living conditions are often not ideal. Despite my situation as a tenant, which I know is far from being the worst, I have lived, over the years, with many people in sometimes contiguous places, I have experienced infestations of mice, bedbugs, neighbors bullies and others who kept me awake at night with techno beatings, a burglary and a major flood.
Over the years, my financial situation has improved and I now live alone, in a large apartment whose rent is not too high. The landlord tried to evict me illegally last summer. I hung on, I took a lawyer, I was able to keep this place which was rightfully mine. I’m leaving town for a new job soon, I’m still moving up the social ladder, and it gives me a quality of life that makes me uncomfortable when I compare it to that of others. I have therefore decided to take advantage of another of my rights, that of assigning my lease: by doing so, I ensure that the landlord will not take advantage of my departure to illegally raise the rent, as he is clearly dreaming of. .
However, this week, the director general of the Corporation of real estate owners of Quebec, Benoit Ste-Marie, made a media appearance to denounce the assignment of lease, which prevents, he says, the owners from adapting to the prices on the market. He hopes that the government will revise this law as soon as possible. Perhaps we are currently experiencing the last moments of this practice, one of the few ways tenants have to fight against the housing crisis, against the artificially inflated prices of the market.
For this lease assignment, I showed my apartment to a friend of a friend. He is Ukrainian. He had just returned from Athens, where he had gone to find his parents who had fled the war there. It was for them that he was looking for a lodging. I told him that I didn’t trust my landlord, that he might do everything in his power to get around the law and take over the lease, but that he had to try anyway. I thought that houses should be shelters, and I regretted that this context did not allow them to be. I found the greed of some very vulgar.