Owner was subdividing apartments into mini rooming houses, borough mayor says

The borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce is promising to prosecute landlords who subdivide apartments into numerous units to maximize profits after a building fire over the weekend shed light on the practice.

Twenty-one residents were forced to flee their residences Sunday morning when a fire broke out in the third-storey of a complex of tightly spaced apartment units on Linton Ave. in Côte-des-Neiges. Residents reported groping their way down smoke-filled staircases, and said no central alarm system went off. One tenant had to seek refuge on the balcony and waited for rescue from firefighters with a ladder. In all, 18 units were evacuated. No one was injured. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but firefighters said they believed it was accidental.

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Once on the scene, CDN-NDG mayor Sue Montgomery said she and firefighters discovered at least four two-bedroom units in one apartment block with a total of six units had been subdivided into four separate rooms. The living rooms were divided into two rooms with a wall in the middle. Tenants told the mayor the landlord was charging them $400 to $500 a month each to stay in a room, and share the kitchen and bathroom. Because the living room was converted into bedrooms, there was no communal living space. The two-bedroom apartments normally rent for about $750 each.

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Montgomery said she called her borough director to send a housing inspector immediately, so that sanctions can be laid against the building owner.

“Here’s what happens when some slumlord converts apartments into rooms and rents out each one for crazy amounts,” Montgomery, a former Montreal Gazette journalist, wrote on her Facebook page , alongside pictures of burned-out apartments. “No smoke alarms; no fire alarms. I don’t know how such people sleep at night, knowing they are taking advantage of vulnerable people and putting lives in danger. Luckily there were no deaths, but 21 people are now homeless, thanks to greed. I will work to stop this.”

“In this case it’s pretty clear cut, we saw what this guy was doing,” she told the Montreal Gazette on Monday. “Converting apartments into a rooming house without a permit, there has to be an infraction right there.”

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Many of the tenants are new immigrants or disenfranchised individuals who are frightened to make waves, she said. The city and the borough have been overly lax on prosecuting landlords, Montgomery said, and should enforce more inspections. In January, the city administration announced it was increasing its number of housing inspectors to 30 from eight. The majority of its 170,000 residents are apartment dwellers.

Photo by Pierre Obendrauf / Montreal Gazette

Montgomery said she spoke to the owner of the building, listed as Habibur Rahman on the city’s registry of building owners, at the fire scene. He denied subdividing the properties, she said. A man who said he was the manager of the building Monday also denied that apartments were divided. Rahman couldn’t be reached for comment by the Gazette.

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The borough is looking into regulations and possible sanctions. Rules regarding subdividing apartments vary among Montreal’s 19 boroughs. Some allow units to be subdivided with certain restrictions, tenants’ rights organizations noted. In CDN-NDG, converting an apartment into a rooming house without proper permits is not permitted.

“It’s not something we see often, but with owners often trying to maximize profits, it’s not surprising,” said Maxime Roy-Allard of the RCLALQ, a coalition of housing committees and tenant associations across Quebec. Individuals worried they are being taken advantage of can contact Quebec’s rental board — the Régie du logement — or their borough, or CND-NDG tenants’ rights groups like l’Oeil and Project Genesis , who all offer services for free.

The fact that landlords might be subdividing apartments indicates a crying need, said Claire Abraham, community organizer for Project Genesis.

“It speaks to how difficult it can be for people in the neighbourhood to find housing they can afford,” she said. “If someone is willing to just to rent a room and for them to not even have access to a proper rooming house, I think it speaks to how difficult it is for people trying to make ends meet.”