I call him Alain to simplify: I’m writing this letter behind his back, without his consent. In fact, I write it under his feet: my ceiling is his floor, and I can hear him making coffee in his kitchen right now. I hear it much less than I imagine, because it’s pretty well soundproofed here.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
I live in a seven-room apartment in the heart of Villeray, which I moved into as a couple in 2016 and which I continued to live in after my breakup in 2019. I have three closed bedrooms, a gigantic double living room, a kitchen full of sunshine, a covered terrace with a view of the green lane… I have a cat, and roommates for the short or medium term from time to time. I pay $1080 rent per month. It is enormous. It is magic. This is an amount that seems adequate to me, even if it is enormous for me alone and magic in the current circumstances of crisis in access to housing.
Alain is my landlord. My home is in his triplex, and I’m fine. I am comfortable telling him what needs to be adjusted or fixed. Instant answers, several repairs, some renovations, services rendered: he is present, available and consistent. Not only did I never get a single raise, but I even got, in the middle of the pandemic, a month’s free rent – because I know it’s not easy for artists right now, that he told me, and that’s my way of telling you that I appreciate you as a tenant.
No need to ask me: I will never move from here. I do not wish in any way to abandon my place of life, this place of benevolence in which I have my place, this place of recognition in which I am. That’s it.
I think he recognizes me, Alain. At home, I am not a number. Not a client, not a pawn that allows other cavalier pawns to better reign in the real estate chessboard. I feel like Véronique, with a story, a daily life and projects that he knows and considers.
Anyway, I can’t afford to move into a three and a half. I’m changing the subject: thinking for a moment about losing my apartment freezes my blood.
I have friends who have duplexes, others who have slums. And there’s me, with my normally maintained apartment, my normally stable rent, and my normally nice landlord. I am writing this letter exactly to publicize this idea: my situation is quite normal. From my point of view, Alain manages his property in a simple, banal way. Ethics and human. He does so in the shadow of a city that no longer knows how to welcome itself home. And he works there in the privacy of his home, without drum or trumpet, without shouting it from the rooftops, without posting it on social networks.
It seems to me that the Montreal housing fleet is only a few dozen, only a few hundred owners like Alain from putting their heads above water. I know, it’s more complicated than that. There is the economy and the debts, the taxes and the law. There are the poor well-to-do people who want to extend their comforts over the crushed survival of others. I don’t want to hear it. If what I’m being told doesn’t give everyone decent housing at a decent enough price to eat and think decently, I repeat, I don’t want to hear it. That’s all. And thank you, Alain, for understanding.