Here we are again, two days before moving day, ready to witness yet another demoralizing spectacle of the failure of housing (non-)policies. Ready to see the ever more serious consequences of decades of laissez-faire; the abandonment of alternatives to the private market to meet the needs of the population. Ready to count homeless families on the evening of the 1er July, congratulating itself hypocritically for having provided 78 million dollars to quickly relocate everyone.
Emergency allowances will be distributed without mentioning the terrifying gap that is created between rents and salaries. Not to mention either the badly housed or the tenants who were already rowing from one apartment to another and who will deposit their furniture in a new apartment with fear in their stomachs, relieved to have landed somewhere, but wondering how the hell they will pay the rent, which will have to be deducted from groceries, which we will not be able to buy for the children.
This is a story that is being written everywhere in Quebec, that of the ordinary anguish of citizens who have not been able to take advantage of the real estate orgy of recent years and who, henceforth, may never be able to access property. Maybe they had dreamed of it once, but not anymore. Now, there are still high rents and the need to plan your life over a shorter horizon, thanks to evictions and ever-increasing pressure on the rental market.
I could rattle off the numbers, they’re much worse than last year. The RCLALQ still published a few days ago its Investigation of the uncontrolled rental market. By compiling the price of housing displayed on Kijiji, the organization calculated that the average rent in Quebec had increased by another 9% this year. In some municipalities, we are talking about increases of 26.5% (Sherbrooke), 29.9% (Trois-Rivières), or even 54.5% (Granby). Absolute madness.
I could mention other figures, those on the alarming vacancy rates for large apartments; I could talk about the average increase of $427 per month collected by tenants who sign a new lease this year. But I would like to talk more about the lives erased by this frenzy; let us focus on the redefinition of neighborhoods and cities and the destruction of living environments. Because beyond the economic indicators, beyond the quantifiable dimension of the housing crisis, there is this imponderable experience of the sanitization of communities that are uprooted in order to rebuild, to the taste of the people a little more rich. It sounds silly, it’s true, but it’s actually as silly as that. So stupid and so violent.
I would like to tell you about the apartment I am about to leave. It’s a Montreal apartment like so many others, perched high up, designed as a large hallway with the front door opening onto the street and the back door onto the alley. As soon as the weather allows it, we have got into the habit of living with open doors, as if to give substance to the idea that the place we live in is above all a passage between one public space and another – at random occasionally find the neighbour’s cat stretched out on the sofa. We enter our home announcing ourselves very loudly with a “Hello! “.
It’s an apartment full of flaws and crevices. One could say: neglected. I prefer to see the traces of all the lives that have followed one another there. Mine, first: a roommate made up of joys as deep as sorrows, of misadventures and improbable evenings. A peaceful solitary life, a love life, a pandemic life. And now a life that we must learn to leave.
I’m lucky it’s not an eviction. Only the feeling of living on an ejection seat: recent sale of the building, renovation of the ground floor, re-let for almost three times the amount of my rent (yes, almost three times). Then, the choreography started: assignment of lease, relocation, further, with a more expensive rent, but safer.
I have nothing to complain about, I am in a privileged situation. However, precisely, it is the very illustration of the problem: the young tenants, without children, with a correct income, still find what to relocate. Passing the problem on to others. It’s a domino effect, constantly erasing and redrawing the fabric of the community. Although I find myself in a relatively enviable situation, I have seen this erasure at work. I saw the vegetal vault that overhung the alley give way to very smooth asphalt. I saw the opaque fences standing between the collective space of the alley and the private terraces. Where we used to gather with the friends to grill vegetables on a small barbecue and drink bad beer until it got as hot as July evenings now line the luxury SUVs. All this in an area that is said to be ideal for families. Not all of them, we understand.
It’s a banal story, a story that is written everywhere, quietly. Money symbolically imposes its presence by stripping neighborhoods and cities of their relief; by cutting short the possibility of sharing space and creating links that last over time. We will have to learn to talk about this desertification, before definitively abandoning the places we live to the market.