Over 100 Montreal households, nearly 700 in Quebec, left without a roof of their own on moving day

Under the rain, in the Montreal neighbourhood of Parc-Extension, Camille Cloutier and three of her roommates spent July 1 — known in Quebec as moving day — like many others in the province, carrying their belongings into their new apartment. Although the space is bigger than the last one, Cloutier says there's already a lot of work to do. 

"There's a problem with the lights in the apartment. The paint is not good. It's really dirty. The price is really high for what we have now, so we're gonna do all the jobs by ourselves," she said.

Cloutier says the high cost of rent and scarcity of affordable accommodation options mean she and her roommates, recent university graduates, don't have much of a choice when it comes to securing affordable housing.

While they are not alone, hundreds of Quebecers are worse off this July 1, struggling to find a roof over their heads on a day that leases typically start in the province.

In Montreal, 107 people are still without a lease today, with 25 families temporarily housed by the city, numbers that are consistent with last year's figures, says Philippe Sabourin, spokesperson for the city of Montreal. 

Meanwhile. across the province, a total of 680 households have not signed a lease, according to the data provided by  the housing advocacy group Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU).

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante says the city has measures in place for moving day, but giving families temporary places to live is far from a long-term solution. 

"This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of families that will come forward, maybe in the next coming days," said Plante on Saturday. "It's not sustainable for anyone, not for the city or those families…. The solution is how do we protect the existing affordable housing market that we have."

Plante says the city is taking novel steps in purchasing private property for social housing and putting measures in place to curb renovictions.

However, she said the Quebec government has to do more.

Meeting with tenants in Montreal's Villeray neighbourhood, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, co-spokesperson for Québec solidaire, called on the provincial government to build more affordable housing units and take immediate action.

"We need to do things now to just calm the frenzy of rent hikes," he said. 

Nadeau-Dubois called for the creation of a rent registry, a measure demanded by the mayors of 14 Quebec municipalities, to inform renters about previous rent charged by landlords. He also demanded a moratorium on evictions in areas hit hard by the housing crisis. 

"Quebec is a rich society. There is no excuse for people not to have a roof over their heads," he said, adding that aside from people with nowhere to go, "there are thousands of families today that will be poorer than yesterday."