For years, Mrs. X rented a unit in her triplex to a low-income person for the modest sum of $500 a month. When the latter left the premises in 2018, Madame X set out to “catch up” with the real estate market. She therefore made some small changes and improvements to the apartment in question. She changed the vanity unit in the bathroom for a new one from IKEA, bought the furniture from the former tenant in order, henceforth, to rent the said accommodation “fully furnished”, “fully equipped”. Overnight, bang!, the “new” “updated” and “improved” housing was available on the market for $900 per month, an increase of 80%.
Can another low-income person now live in this dwelling? Of course not, unless you stop eating. Have workers’ incomes increased so much, allowing them to keep up with the market? No. But what do you want, that’s it, the real estate market.
This is, after all, a banal story. Every day, across Quebec, countless similar stories unfold before our eyes. Tenants leave housing or, worse, are evicted, or “renovated”, and rents increase dramatically, substantially, even exponentially, in just a few days. Like Mrs. X, many landlords have decided in recent years to “renovate” a dwelling, to catch up with the market and, after a few hours of work and odds and ends, they increase the rent by 50%, 80% %, 100%, or even 200%. Who, anyway, can stop them? It’s their building. They are proud and successful owners! They worked hard and it is the law of the market, in fact, that manages real estate.
And these people, let’s say it, are “good people”. They are not vulgar real estate exploiters, profiteering carnivores. They are (or so they say) progressives-feminists-environmentalists-independentists, in short, “all the kit”, social democrats who eat organic, local and truly fair-trade products. But where the fuck are the humanists? Because, in the end, by stirring up all these Quebec “households”, by “renovating” these little 3 and a half apartments that are as badly soundproofed as before, we have forgotten the people who live in them, the human beings.
With each passing day, low-income people are directly affected by this socio-economic violence, incapable as they are of finding simple, affordable, suitable, drinkable housing, incapable of relocating or moving. But, as the Minister of Finance of Quebec, Eric Girard, recently affirmed, it is necessary to increase the standard of living of Quebecers, to “catch up” with the Canadian real estate market, to get rich a bit. Yes, but at what price ? More importantly, who unfairly pays the price? Did I mention Madame X is going through hell with the new tenant living over her head at $900 a month? Yes, socio-economic violence has a price. Revolt rumbles everywhere. Do you feel it?