The City of Montreal has approved plans for the transformation of a youth hostel in Old Montreal, which has rooms without windows or emergency exits, which contravenes current standards.
This establishment also belongs to the owner of the building burned down in Old Montreal on March 16, who also operates a rooming house where accommodation is illegally rented on Airbnb, noted The duty.
In 2007, lawyer Emile-Haim Benamor acquired a three-storey building built in 1923 on rue Notre-Dame Est, in Old Montreal. The building has since been converted into a youth hostel with 20 rooms spread over two floors which obtained its registration number from the Corporation de l’industrie touristique du Québec (CITQ).
The duty rented a room on the Airbnb short-term rental platform in order to be able to visit the premises and found that two rooms had no windows or emergency exits. The building is also not equipped with any sprinklers.
In an interview, Neir Abissidan, a man presenting himself as “one of the operators” of the building, confirms having successfully completed all the administrative procedures to obtain a registration number at the CITQ which allows him to to operate as a hotel legally and to rent out its rooms on the various short-term rental platforms.
The manager also provided the Duty the plans of the building, which confirm the presence of two rooms without windows or emergency exits. These were approved by a firm of architects, then by the City, which issued a transformation permit.
“To have a certificate, you have to send plans, the plans must be stamped. We work with the borough, we work with the CITQ and we are not part of the 92% “of illegal rentals on Airbnb in the metropolis, launches Neir Abissidan, in reference to the data collected in this sense by the analysis site of Inside Airbnb data.
“We, everything you saw was stamped by the City of Montreal,” insisted Mr. Abissidan in an interview. Words that The duty was able to confirm by consulting official documents with a permit number issued by the City.
According to the regulations in force, however, it is forbidden to build rooms without windows or emergency exits, for safety reasons, which is confirmed by one of the two architects who approved the plans for this building, Isaac Alt, from Montreal firm Alt and Agapi Architectes.
“All rooms used as bedrooms must have a window. So maybe these rooms were used as office spaces, as a reception or as a laundry room, ”says Mr. Alt, in an interview with the Duty. “The City would not have approved two bedrooms without windows,” he adds.
However, the plans do mention that the two windowless rooms are “bedrooms”. The duty has also consulted advertisements published on Airbnb and on other sites, such as Booking.com, where it was possible in the last days to rent a windowless room in this building.
Several customers have also deplored in recent weeks on the Booking.com platform the absence of a window in the accommodation they have rented in this building, in addition to deploring poor heating and the lack of staff present in this establishment. commercial.
“The room I was given had no window to the outside, which I consider a fire hazard. It would be impossible to be rescued from the outside in the event of a fire in the building. The windows overlooked a common area of the unit, did not open and had no privacy,” wrote a Canadian woman who stayed one night in this hostel on December 31.
On the spot, The duty Wasn’t greeted by any staff in this building, which also doesn’t have a reception. Instead, customers of this establishment obtain an online code to open the entrance to the building. They must then enter another code to open the padlock located at the entrance to their room in order to have access to the key to it.
In this context, the President and CEO of the Hotel Association of Greater Montreal, Jean-Sébastien Boudreault, deplores certain shortcomings in the requirements of the Government of Quebec for obtaining a registration number with the CITQ, which may pose security issues, he said.
“Everything is done online, actually. Is it too easy? I don’t know. It’s all a matter of validation afterwards,” notes the Deputy Director General of St-Laurent Youth Hostels, Isabelle Boyer. To his knowledge, no on-site visit is carried out by Revenu Québec inspectors before a CITQ registration number is issued to an establishment.
Joined by The dutythe City of Montreal had not answered our questions at the time these lines were written.
A rooming house on Airbnb
The owner of the heritage building that was engulfed in flames last Thursday in Old Montreal is also using a rooming house he owns on rue Viger Est to make illegal short-term rentals in this area.
In recent years, the City of Montreal has multiplied its efforts to try to keep rooming houses on its territory, the number of which has dwindled over the years due to real estate speculation. Protecting them is important to the City, because rents are generally affordable. Municipal elected officials have often called rooming houses the last bulwark against homelessness in the metropolis.
However, the plumber Dylan James Victoria had been offered a rent of 1250 dollars for a three and a half apartment in this building, in 2021. He left this building after five months due to the presence of vermin and short-term rentals that kept him awake.
“Basically it does Airbnbs downstairs, there was no hospitality license, there were no hospitality signs. And there were a lot of rats crawling, coming out,” Mr Victoria recalls. “Basically, I left because of that. There were a lot of people leaving, going out, there were parties in the evening, there were a lot of tenants who had complained about it, ”he says.
Neighbors who wish to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals were able to confirm to the Duty the incessant comings and goings of tenants on the Airbnb platform, who sometimes ring the doorbell to find their room. However, the regulations of the borough of Ville-Marie prohibit short-term tourist rentals in this sector.
“That’s it (from Airbnb). We constantly see people passing by with suitcases, ”says a person from the neighborhood who contacted Revenu Québec after learning of the fire this week.
“We saw what he was doing in the newspapers and we found it really indecent of him to say that it is his tenants who make Airbnb illegal”, specifies the man, who has known Mr. Benamor for many years. years.