Layoffs on July 1: “It was an anticipated disaster”

The housing crisis currently raging in Quebec means that July 1, according to Vivre en Ville's housing director Adam Mongrain, will be “the worst of our lifetimes.”

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“It was an anticipated disaster,” he said in an interview on the show “Le Quebec Matin.” It's not even July 1st and it's already a disaster. Figures currently coming in from municipalities and the Administrative Housing Tribunal indicate that we are currently heading for the worst July 1st of our lives.

“We don't seem to be taking the right steps to ensure that next year, 2025, is not the worst of our lives again,” he said.

Two months before the July 1 deadline, many people are struggling to find adequate housing.

“Finding suitable housing is a full-time job and many people looking to move already have a full-time job,” says the expert.

“Spending hours and hours sifting through ads online and in newspapers can be very demanding, difficult, stressful and frustrating. […] And progress is not being made,” he adds.

However, there are rehousing assistance services that provide temporary assistance.

“Experts are supportive of trying to make tenants match Between the vacant apartment and the rented house, the director of housing was mentioned in Vivre en Ville.

“It's helpful for callers to know that they are eligible for government assistance and that there may be specific resources that can help them,” he said.

However, these services have their limitations.

“There's a hard limit to this because we can't put a house in an apartment that doesn't exist,” he says. What we are seeing right now is that the needs are far greater than the available apartments.

“Whatever the seed sows, the fruit will grow”

According to Adam Mongren, the situation has reached this point due to a lack of urgency from public decision-makers on the matter in recent years.

“What we sow is what we reap,” he explained. There is an accumulated delay in our actions announced or in place and in the seriousness we give to this issue. This puts us a little bit in the perfect storm we've been talking about in recent years.

“We haven't really moved to prevent and now we're moving a bit to wipe out the damage, which has exceeded the expectations that have been made and the necessary measures have not yet been announced to prevent it from contaminating us for the rest of our lives,” he continues.

The Trudeau government's announcements on housing encourage this, but if they are to lead to real change, agreements with other levels of government are needed.

“It will take time to become concrete,” he says. Agreements must be negotiated between cities or provinces. The money announced will lead to new construction, which will do a lot of good, but will take years to build.

“We rely a lot on governments to agree on measures that are applicable and really help the population,” he said.

Watch the full interview in the video above