Are you happy at home? Or are you dreaming of moving? In the midst of a housing crisis, The Duty has called on readers’ stories, which are published during the summer. The explosion in the cost of living, the housing shortage and conflicts all over the world are such that even the well-housed are worried about the future. They wonder how long their luck will last.
Claude Paquette loves the apartment she has lived in for eight years, on top of a triplex in Otterburn Park, next to Mont Saint-Hilaire. She frequents the mountain regularly. The Richelieu River flows right by her home. It’s beautiful. It’s green. It’s peaceful. But the retiree is worried. She sees big black clouds on the horizon.
“We live in crazy times. We have a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over our heads that we didn’t have before. The future seems uncertain to me for many reasons,” she says.
Where do you start? With the fear of losing your home. Relations with the landlady are strained because the tenant pays a rent lower than the area average. She and her two neighbors in the building have contested the 5.76% increase imposed last spring by the landlady.
“There are limits to increasing the rent. This increase was not supported by any justification. At some point, it exceeds my ability to pay,” says Claude Paquette, who acknowledges her privilege: as a retiree from the health system, the occupational therapist enjoys a defined benefit pension. Her rent still represents a third of her income.
The common front of the three tenants failed. The landlady threatened to “build a case” against them at the Administrative Housing Tribunal. For fear of being labeled (wrongly) as “bad tenants”, they bought peace. And accepted the increase.
“I had a condo before I moved here. Oh, Saint Anne! I don’t recommend that to anyone. It was hard to get along with the other co-owners. I decided to move to an apartment to have less stress, but it’s not always fun to rent either,” she says.
Other pitfalls
Claude Paquette is not reassured. She fears that the building will be put up for sale. It’s a classic: new owners often evict tenants under the pretext of housing a member of their family. The 73-year-old woman wonders where she would go. Housing is extremely rare and overpriced.
The arrival of Northvolt in the neighboring city risks amplifying the housing shortage. Nearly 3,000 employees would come to work in the future car battery factory. The uncertainty surrounding the future of the project calms him down a little. Barely.
Seniors’ residences are also inaccessible: three of them have just closed their doors in the area. And those that remain have long waiting lists despite their exorbitant prices.
Speaking of waiting lists, Claude Paquette is worried about the retirement of her family doctor, who is 67. In an ideal world, she would eventually have to find a doctor close to home, if old age were to one day prevent her from driving her car. Because public transportation is “insufficient and unreliable,” according to her, in Otterburn Park as in all suburbs.
Traffic congestion is becoming “terrible” in the region, notes the retiree. One more reason to be depressed. And it’s not by watching the news or reading the newspapers that she finds her morale. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, changes, and we’re not going in the right direction.”
A glimmer of hope in this gloomy portrait: the arrival of Kamala Harris in the race for the American presidency. “I am so happy, it’s a relief,” says Claude Paquette.
“Fragile” comfort
She is not the only tenant experiencing anxiety. The housing crisis is one of the main causes of stress among people receiving psychiatric care, warned the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec (RCLALQ) last May.
The fear of losing one’s home—or the actual loss of one’s home—is one of the greatest stresses humans can experience. Mental health resources report an increase in insomnia, distress, depression, and suicidal thoughts among renters.
Homeowners are also feeling the effects of the prevailing gloom. Marie Trudel is one of the “privileged” who enjoy comfortable housing. And paid for. But she considers her luck as a fragile little thing that could vanish at any moment.
“I look at my house and I say to myself, ‘I have all that,’ plus the holy peace of North America and Canada,” says the 70-year-old retiree.
“Yes, I enjoy my comfort, but there’s something bittersweet about it,” she adds. “Everything worries me. Trump, climate change, Ukraine, Gaza. Everything. There’s no such thing as a belle époque, there’s no such thing. There’s no time or place that’s safe from crisis. I’m always surprised to wake up every morning and find that nothing around me has changed.”
Last week’s deluge in Montreal and surrounding areas reminded him that “everything can change in the blink of an eye.” People lost everything in minutes. Basements flooded. Houses literally fell off their foundations in torrential rain.
A quiet little corner
Marie Trudel has found an oasis of peace and greenery in the Anjou borough in eastern Montreal. She loves her small condominium, purchased five years ago, on the ground floor of a three-storey building.
Yet this area looks like a sea of concrete: two highways, an industrial park and countless four-lane boulevards scar the neighbourhood. “I feel good in this Montreal mix of correct and hideous,” she says calmly.
The grandmother lives in one of the neighbourhood’s bucolic corners, halfway between Lucie-Bruneau Park and Lake Anjou. It brings a bit of green into her life when she walks to one of the two bus lines that lead to a distant metro station. Public transit is perfect for diving into a novel while crossing “really ugly stretches of street,” she says.
This great reader, open to the world, quotes Zola, Balzac, Dumas, but also Salman Rushdie, Laurent Gaudé and José Saramago. It’s hard to believe that she decided at the age of 13 to drop out of school three years later. Which she did.
“I had decided that if I was going to be poor, I would always educate myself, I would have jobs – more than 20 – that I liked and I would love my houses – more than 20 too,” says this free spirit, who has been a widow for 30 years.
The world is going bad
Over the years, his low-paying jobs have brought him into contact with some seriously down-and-out colleagues. One of his first jobs, half a century ago, at the buffet of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel — Montreal’s most luxurious — brought him into contact with employees from Greece, Chile and other countries that were at the time embroiled in violence.
She remembers Greek friends who would cram into a single apartment so they could send money to their wives back home. Since then, Trudel has been sensitive to the plight of refugees from Syria, Haiti and elsewhere, “who know people who have died and aren’t even buried,” because of the chaos in their country.
The economic and social crisis that hit Argentina between 1998 and 2002 left its mark on her. The middle class of a relatively prosperous country was sinking into poverty. This hypersensitivity to the sad fate of the “wretched of the earth”, as Frantz Fanon wrote, has always made her appreciate the privilege of her life in Quebec. All the while preparing for the worst.
While waiting for the possible end of a world, “even if it’s not here yet, not this year yet, not this month yet, inevitably, I love my fragile house,” Marie Trudel sums up. She wants to stay there as long as possible, as long as she remains independent. By reading novels. Surrounded by her son, her daughter and her grandson, who live a reasonable distance away.