Are you happy at home? Or are you dreaming of moving? In the midst of a housing crisis, The duty has called for reader stories, which will be published over the summer. Tenants are tired of living with mice. But they are fighting to keep their place in a small house in Parc-Extension.
Marilou L. welcomes us to the small house of shoebox that she shares with two roommates in the Parc-Extension neighborhood of Montreal. The decor is warm, but the tenant has had her ups and downs since moving into the house three years ago. The building clearly suffers from a lack of maintenance. And relations with the landlord are difficult.
The master’s student in literary studies, who also works in a bookstore, shows us around her home. Of duct tape plugs a hole in the bathroom ceiling. Mold lines the wall of a cabinet and the threshold of the kitchen door. The brick wall at the back of the building is slowly decaying.
The house is damp, poorly insulated, and costs a fortune to heat. The tenants had to file a complaint with the City to combat a mouse infestation. The critters entered through a missing tile in the kitchen floor. For all these reasons, the rent is relatively low compared to the Montreal rental market ($1,030 per month).
Given the difficulty of finding accommodation in Montreal, Marilou and her roommates decided to make their nest in the shoebox. The three tenants, queer people, have found happiness in this cocoon where everyone can be themselves. The place gives off an impression of calm and peace. A banner of rainbow flags, funny embroidery and a bookcase filled with feminist and queer books reign in the living room.
In the large backyard with a terrace, you can hear the birds singing. There is a clothesline, an old shed, a vegetable garden. A retired Greek couple, neighbors from the alley, come here to pick what they need to cook stuffed vine leaves.
“Over the years, we have cultivated a welcoming space where we frequently host our friends and organize queer events (brunches, game nights, watching leaders’ debates, discussion groups, etc.),” Marilou wrote when inviting us to her home.
Threat of demolition
She agrees to be photographed, but asks that her identity not be revealed. She fears that standing up for her rights will harm her in her search for future housing.
Relations with the owner of the house became sour. Martin B. (to whom we grant anonymity, like his tenants; it is a pseudonym) bought the old house around fifteen years ago with the intention of reselling it one day. When Marilou and his friends signed a lease in 2021, he warned them that he planned to sell the house in the next year and that they might have to move out.
Marilou was exhausted, after a crazy quest that had taken her to visit between 15 and 20 apartments, all of them inadequate. She signed the lease despite this warning. A year later, an investor made an offer to buy. He wanted to demolish the house to build several apartments.
To do this, the tenants’ lease had to be terminated. They know their rights: they refused, reminding the owner that they would probably win their case before the Administrative Housing Tribunal. The sale of the house fell through. Everyone is angry.
“My relationship with this space is a love-hate relationship,” says Marilou L. “I’m tired of having to fight with the landlord, of not knowing if I’ll have a roof over my head in the coming months. He’s made it clear that we’re undesirables that he literally wants to get rid of more than rodents.”
Continuous battle
The owner is discouraged. He says he has had anxiety since the aborted sale of the house. He is angry with the tenants who refuse to leave.
“They went back on their word. They realized that maybe they have the right to stay, after all. I lost several tens of thousands of dollars because of their bad faith,” Martin B. told Duty.
Martin B. admits to neglecting to maintain the building in recent years. “We’re not going to undertake major renovations if the house is going to be demolished eventually,” he says.
Marilou L. doesn’t care about her owner’s moods. She means no harm, but she knows the law. And the law protects tenants against the sale of their home to a buyer who wants to demolish it.
This strategy of some owners is well known: they let a house deteriorate until all that remains is to destroy it. They tell you that they are throwing you onto the street for your own good, to prevent you from living in substandard housing. A developer buys the building and — since it must be destroyed — replaces it with apartments sold at high prices.
A sector in transformation
The Parc-Extension neighbourhood, which is among the most multicultural and disadvantaged in Montreal, is changing rapidly. The inauguration in 2019 of the MIL campus of the Université de Montréal, on the immense vacant lot on the border of Outremont, brought wealthy and educated people to Parc-Extension in search of housing.
Apartment buildings crowded with Greek, Indian and Pakistani immigrants are giving way to condominiums — $500,000 and up, with “granite countertops” and other eminently “trendy” features.
We call it gentrification. The poor are being pushed out by the rich. There shoebox that houses Marilou and her roommates is on the front lines of gentrification. The owner of the neighboring house, a 71-year-old woman who has lived there since 1983, also fears the arrival of “investors” obsessed with building condos.
“I get a lot of offers from people who want to buy my shoebox, but I will never sell! Where would I go? » says Kim Anh Ta, who fled war-torn Vietnam in the 1970s. She has the impression of being chased away again, this time by real estate developers.
She would hate it if the small house next door — where Marilou and her roommates live — was replaced by a condominium apartment building. No more mutual aid between neighbors. The chatter, the smiles, the solidarity. The retiree remembers that nearby, on the same street, a house gave way to a “block of condos”. The neighbor died shortly after…
Marilou reluctantly decided to leave the shoebox at the end of summer. She found accommodation with another friend, which will cost her $200 more per month, but she will have peace of mind. She, the activist of the queer movement, resistant against capitalism and against all systems of oppression, is tired. “At the end. »