What it's like to be stuck without a lease after July 1 in Montreal
Single mother yet to find place to live, despite dozens of apartment visits
On June 30, instead of settling into a new apartment with four of her children, Angela Ottereyes packed up all her stuff and moved it into a storage unit.
She's now staying in a downtown Montreal hotel, with her two youngest children more than 700 kilometres away.
Over the past few months, Ottereyes figures she visited about 40 apartments and reached out to about 100 more, looking for a place to live with four of her children.
But July 1 moving day came and went, and Ottereyes and her kids are still without a new lease.
In the meantime, Ottereyes sent her two youngest, seven and nine, to stay in her home community of Waskaganish, a Cree nation at the bottom tip of James Bay in Northern Quebec where her two adult children live.
Ottereyes and her 17-year-old twins are staying in the hotel until they can find long-term housing.
"It's been difficult for the kids, having to be in one room all the time," said Ottereyes, 39. She says her youngest have also been asking to come back to Montreal to be with her.
The arrangement is better than the other plan Ottereyes had of staying in a shelter. It's more private and stable, she said, but the upheaval hasn't been easy.
She and her children are among the nearly 500 renters in the province still searching for a place to live, according to data released earlier this week by housing advocacy organization Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU).
The group and its partners across Quebec counted 494 households without a rental unit and who sought help from housing groups or municipalities on July 2, the day after the province's traditional moving day when most leases begin and end.
Many municipalities in Quebec, like others across the country, are experiencing a severe housing crunch. A lack of social housing and rising cost of living has made it increasingly difficult for people to find affordable housing. According to a Radio-Canada analysis, rents rose 44 per cent in the past decade. The crisis is challenging Quebec's identity as one of the most affordable places to live in Canada.
'Tip of the iceberg'
In Montreal, 115 households sought help after moving day. But FRAPRU believes many more are between leases.
"The numbers are the tip of the iceberg," Véronique Laflamme, a spokesperson for FRAPRU, said at a news conference Tuesday in Montreal.
She said groups have in recent years seen a rise in people without permanent homes in the weeks after July 1. The phenomenon runs parallel to a rise in homelessness across the country, she noted.
"Ten years ago, this didn't last two or three months," saud Laflamme. "Now, it takes several weeks for people to be able to sign a new lease."
Laflamme fears worsening housing situations for the province's most vulnerable will be become a new normal.
The Quebec government has remained without a housing plan since Premier François Legault came into power nearly five years ago. And federal housing initiatives encourage private development rather than non-profit housing, Laflamme said.
Montreal homeless shelter La Maison du Père says its first-time clients more than doubled this year ahead of July 1.
Ottereyes says she's been keeping her chin up as much as possible. An organization offered to pay for her family's hotel stay and the hotel itself is a place she knows, since members of her community frequently stay there while undergoing medical treatment in the city.
"I don't feel homeless. I still have my group of friends, my little community here," she said.
She decided not to renew the lease on her Plateau-Mont-Royal apartment in February so that she and her kids could move closer to her twins' school, which was a 50-minute commute each way for them.
Pursuing law studies
She hadn't anticipated finding another three-bedroom unit would be so difficult, considering she was looking in several neighbourhoods and has a monthly budget of $3,000, thanks to part-time work and subsidies from the school board in Waskaganish for community members pursuing higher education.
Ottereyes is a full-time student in the law, society and justice program at Dawson College, which she started in 2021 after her a cancer diagnosis was declared in remission. She wants to enroll into a university law program.
During the school year, she works part time at the school's First Peoples' Centre and in the summer, she works as an administrative assistant.
She also holds beading workshops. In an interview with CBC, Ottereyes sewed beads, moving her hands in swift motions, barely needing to look at what she was doing.
"It's a way that I stay connected with culture," she said.
But her status as a student living with four children appears to have spooked landlords, several of whom told her so outright — often without even asking for financial documents. Some told her she'd have to participate in a bidding contest with 15 other prospective tenants, a practice that is illegal in Quebec.
"This is supposed to be a student town! Yet they won't even rent to students," she said. "It's crazy. I don't have time to bid for a place, you know?"
Ottereyes believes she may have secured a place for mid-July or August and is staying hopeful she'll find something big enough for her family soon.
When Ottereyes recounts how a friend messaged her this week, asking how she was holding up, she starts to laugh.
"I'm like, "Cancer, homelessness.… Nothing will bring me down. I'm good."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Paula Dayan-Perez and Melissa François