The building is splattered with different shades of paint. Its doors and windows are covered with posters. The message is as clear as the graffiti sprayed across its walls: the crowd who gathered around the building on Wednesday doesn’t want Airbnbs in their neighbourhood and to them, it is a brick-and-glass symbol of housing crisis.
Carrying banners and flags, demonstrators demanded municipal and provincial leaders enforce a bylaw against short-term rentals — a bylaw the borough of Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve says it doesn’t have the power to fully implement.
Last spring, the borough banned new commercial tourist accommodations to, in its words, help protect tenants and preserve the city’s rental stock. However, it also said at the time that the bylaw doesn’t apply to owners with existing permits or people renting out their primary residence.
On Wednesday, Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve mayor Pierre Lessard-Blais confirmed that the borough did issue permits for three short-term rentals in the building.
But Les Propriétés Strawberry, the company that owns the building on Ontario Street and hosts its Airbnbs, is suing the borough and the city of Montreal to repeal the bylaw.
According to court documents reviewed by CBC, in 2021, several years before the bylaw was passed, the company received a construction permit from the borough for a three-storey building with 26 housing units. The purpose: the “construction and eventual operation of a multi-unit residential building, with the intention of renting it out in the short term,” the document reads.
Unhappy neighbours Annie Lapalme, a community organizer at Entraide Logement Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, helped organize the protest. “We can’t accept that real estate companies violate the regulations that we’ve fought for, to protect the rental stocks and tenants,” she said.
Goulet says affordable housing “no longer exists” in the neighbourhood. Kim St-Pierre, who helps give out clothing to those in need, said she is disheartened by the presence of a building that houses some short-term rentals charging hundreds of dollars a night while “people that actually live here and contribute to the society of Hochelaga, are forced to move out, live with a bunch of people or either just live on the street.”
In place of short-term rentals, Beaudin-Marcoux wants to see affordable and social housing units, something he says is in dire need.
Emmanuel Cree, a community organizer at the Organisation Populaire des Droits Sociaux, an organization that defends the rights of people receiving social assistance, says that the mental health of the people he works with has deteriorated and more are ending up on the street.
The blame game The issue, according to the borough’s mayor, is that despite the bylaw, the borough lacks the power to verify if people are being honest about how they use the short-term rental space. “If someone comes to the borough and says this apartment is my main residence, we have to believe this person because the city doesn’t have the tools to verify if this person is really telling the truth,” said Lessard-Blais.
Revenu Québec told CBC it doesn’t have the ability to determine whether a person is renting tourist accommodations in ways that comply with municipal bylaws and that it’s up to municipalities to ensure bylaws are enforced. It also says it has doubled its number of tourist-accommodation inspectors.
But while the blame game continues, and the angry crowd with megaphones marches away from the building on Ontario Street, Montreal’s housing crisis continues to loom large over the streets of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. “You better start acting for the people who rent in this neighbourhood,” Cree said, addressing policy makers. Otherwise, he says, it will face “a social crisis.”
