700 households homeless on Moving Day
François Legault says we never have a Moving Day with nobody finding a new place to go. This rainy Saturday there are nearly 700 households in Quebec, more than 100 of them in Montreal, who’ve had to leave their previous home with no new address. As previously noted here, it isn’t only Montreal but all across Quebec that the housing crisis continues to worsen.
The city is under three warnings: smog, severe thunderstorm watch and severe thunderstorm warning. It was alarmingly dark here around 11, with some thunder and rain, but seems to be lightening up at the moment.
mare 13:42 on 2023-07-01 Permalink
I’m always wondering *why* people have to move out. Don’t we have pretty good rent control? (Apart from evil landlords who renovict, or evict people because their imaginary family member moves in*, but that’s relatively rare.)
Is it because their relationship fell apart and they can’t afford their apartment anymore on one income?
But why do they move out when they haven’t secured a new place yet? They can move whenever they want during the year and transfer their lease to someone else without a problem. (Although the CAQ wants to change that.)
*BTW the evicted tenant can demand a hearing at the TAL if that happens and that child or close family member (a nephew is not close family) needs to be present and attest in front of a court they are indeed moving in. If they don’t it’s perjury and the tenant can get their apartment back and/or a large sum of money.
waffles 14:00 on 2023-07-01 Permalink
Renovictions aren’t rare :-/
ste 15:34 on 2023-07-01 Permalink
This might just be bad advice, but it beats being homeless: “sorry I didn’t find a truck. so maybe next week”. The landlord (and new tenant) are SOL until they go through the TAL to get a bailiff, with police assistance, to actually make you homeless.
Blork 16:55 on 2023-07-01 Permalink
Mare, it’s been a while since I was a renter, but typically (as you know) you need to alert your landlord three months in advance of the end of your lease if you don’t plan to renew. But three months before July 1 the pool of available apartments opening up on that date is unknown, so it’s sort of a paradox. You have to notify that you’re not renewing BEFORE you have found a new place.
Even if you do find a place back in March, that place is probably available for immediate occupancy, so unless you want to pay double rent for three months you’ll not likely secure that apartment.
As for transferring the lease to another person, that involves FINDING another person who is willing to take over your lease at just the right time. Not necessarily easy, especially for the working poor who tend to be dealing with an awful lot of day-to-day problems so they don’t necessarily have the time, inclination, or even know-how to go about doing that.
The result, I suspect, is that many of these people who are stuck on July 1 are people who gave notification of non-renewal back in March on the assumption that they would be able to find something before July 1 (which is basically the story for almost everyone who gives notice in March), but for whatever reasons have not been able to find another apartment.
Ste: that is bad advice. It might keep you from being homeless for a short time, but you’re just transferring the homelessness to the new tenant, and in the meantime making a colossal asshole out of yourself for not being someone who can own their mistakes and instead just passes them on to someone else.
CE 19:40 on 2023-07-01 Permalink
More than once, I’ve secured an apartment in the final week of July after spending the previous two months trying to find something. It’s a very stressful situation to be in. I can’t imagine being in that position with children and no support network.
Kevin 20:31 on 2023-07-01 Permalink
A tornado warning popped up for me earlier today… although I was outside city limits.
SMD 09:01 on 2023-07-02 Permalink
@Mare, your description of a tenant’s recourse in case of a fraudulent repossession is a lovely vision of how it should be. If only it were so! In reality, the law does not require a family member to testify at the TAL, and a successful repossession challenge leads neither to regaining the home nor to a large sum. The burden of proof is on the tenant to prove that the landlord did not intend to have the family member move in at the time when the notice was given. A classic move is for the landlord to say that they intended to at the time, but then changed their mind later (for which there is no sanction). The only sure ways to prove their ill-faith that I’ve heard of is if the family member is dead or living outside the country. Only 30% of the repossession challenges that get to the TAL are successful, and in over half of those cases if was because of a procedural issue. And even if the tenant wins, they most certainly do not have a right of return; at best the judge will award them a few thousand dollars as damages (median of $3,000). So there is no real penalty for landlords who use this trick, which is why they do it constantly. Even the landlord who claimed his mother was moving in to all twenty units of his Petite-Patrie apartment building got away with it unsanctioned. For a deep dive on the issue, I highly recommend this report: https://rclalq.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Rapport_Martin_Galli%C3%A9_Les_expulsions_sans-faute_version-courte.pdf.