City: Don’t move house if you don’t have to
The city is advising people not to move house if they can avoid it, because it always involves massive hikes in rent.
I didn’t think anyone was moving house for fun, although I’m old enough to remember a time when finding a new apartment wasn’t a traumatic event.
Blork 11:04 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
In my first ten years in Montreal I moved eight times. Always looking for that one extra thing or whatever. Rents were cheap, but cheap apartments always had flaws. Too cold in winter, too dark, too grim, no balcony, etc. I was finally shocked into the modern era when I gave up the lease of my $600 a month 5-1/2 in 1999 (not enough light, although I stayed there four years) and then realized I couldn’t find anything nice for under $1400 around the Plateau or Mile End. So I moved to Westmount ($800 for a 4-1/2) because I could no longer afford the Plateau.
Kate 11:10 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
One year, I lived in three different apartments, due to relationship issues and so on. But it was a long time ago.
Ian 11:17 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
It’s actually cheaper in the east end of Outremont than Mile End now.
Josh 11:22 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
Moving because you just… didn’t like the place you lived. What a wild throwback of an idea.
Josh 11:24 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
I had that same experience of three apartments in a year, Kate. Two places a block and a half apart on Wellington street in Verdun, and then a 1-1/2 in the Plateau.
Kate 12:11 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
Plateau apartments were up to $1400 in 1999?
Josh: I know. Moving house on a whim. But remembering how some streets would be full of moving trucks on July 1, people did.
DeWolf 12:22 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
I was apartment hunting in early 2003 and I remember seeing a 3 1/2 on St-Hubert for $900, but it was huge and newly renovated. And right on the beautiful part of St-Hubert, of course.
That year I ended up renting a 2 1/2 at Park and Fairmount for $300, and then a year later my girlfriend and I got a 4 1/2 at Park and Bernard for $495. It was run down but when you’re 19 years old you don’t really care. A few years later our ground floor neighbours transferred us their lease and we got a more well-maintained version of the same apartment, but with a backyard and a large basement with a cinder block wall on which some previous tenant had painted the album cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’.
MarcG 12:40 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
Blork, you might want to check your 1999 date, might off by a decade?
Robert H 12:50 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
“So I moved to Westmount ($800 for a 4-1/2) because I could no longer afford the Plateau.”
Wow. Though perhaps it was unremarkable at the time, I’m impressed you can say that. I was still living in Boston then, a city with even more severe housing issues than Montreal, then as now.
Blork 13:59 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
Remember that 1999 was pretty much peak madness for rentals on the Plateau. Vacancy was effectively 0%. So there were apartments “available” for $900 or so, but when you’d go there it would be an absolute dump. You’d occasionally see something that sounded reasonably nice and between $1000-$1200 but there would literally be 30 or 40 people lined up out front coming to make a bid on it, most of whom were carrying envelopes of cash to bribe the landlord. I did finally view a couple of places in the $1400 range that were quite nice, and had no lineups, but I couldn’t swallow a rent pill that big.
So I looked elsewhere. I found a nice 4-1/2 in a large charming building on Ste-Catherine O. in Westmount for $800. No lineups, no bribes. Laundry in the building. No problem.
Blork 16:08 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
Historical notes: 1999 was a feverish time. Y2K was almost upon us (not just the Y2K technical fears, but the crazy and euphoric fever-dream that comes from being at the end of a decade, a century, and a millennium all at the same time).
Combine that with Plateaumania, which was fuelled in part by the 1997 Utne Reader magazine that called out the Plateau as one of the 14 “hippest neighbourhoods in the world.” This was all happening at the dawn of the “hipster” age, when people were falling over themselves for MORE and BETTER and CONSPICUOUSLY SO as part of life in the magical new millennium. The Web and precursors to social media were still new and exciting. It was like a techno-utopian new age.
By 2002 it was over. Vacancy on the Plateau was still low, but “normal low,” so you didn’t get the landlord bribes and the lineups to view apartments from a couple of years earlier. The change of millennium was a bit of an anti-climax, with no one even thinking about it anymore by the end of 2000. Then 9/11 changed the mood everywhere. Culturally, we (metaphorically) went from cocaine to quaalude in the span of about three years. So yeah, by 2003 or 2004 it was no longer almost impossible to score an apartment on the Plateau, and the ones in the normal (rising) rent range were accessible, unlike just a few years before.
At least that’s how I remember it!
DeWolf 17:09 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
I remember the vacancy rate was still very low in early 2003. Many candidates for any apartment, landlords demanding illegal deposits, etc. I only found that $300 2 1/2 after failing to get a number of other apartments and it was a lease transfer.
Joey 21:03 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
In 2000 I rented a two-floor apartment with two roommates on Coloniale and Prince-Arthur. I think the rent was $960. I guess not everyone read the Utne Reader.